I was confused when I saw Made in Dagenham last week as at the end it included some black and white news clippings from the 1960s showing older women on strike, while the film used much younger women.
The successful and inspiring film is a dramatisation of the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham car plant where female workers walked out in protest against sexual discrimination over pay. But how truthful was the film?
A woman who was brought up on a council estate in Dagenham in a street full of Ford workers wrote to The Mail this week and doesn’t think it was. She wrote to the paper saying:
“I was intrigued to to see that most of the women strikers in the film are young, whereas most of the women I recall working on the factory floor were middle-aged. They certainly didn’t use bad language: they come from the Forties generation and women just didn’t swear then. Nor did they strip down to their undies at work.”
Well I guess the film makers can defend themselves by describing this as “a dramatisation”, and at least they didn’t knock 30 years off Barbara Castle – a real heroine for standing up against Ford and supporting these determined and courageous women.
The part of the film which I found most moving was when the beautiful wife of one of the Ford bosses confided in Andrea, the feisty strike leader, about how unhappy and unfulfilled she felt. She was highly intelligent and had a degree, but was not allowed to use her brains, and instead lived the life of a servile wife whose husband looked down on her.
I was reminded of the ageism untruths behind Made in Dagenham after reading today about two Corrie soap stars, Sue Nicholls and Beverley Callard, who compalined that the acting industry was ageist towards women. There is certainly no shortage of talented older actresses in this country.
Now wouldn’t these two have been great in the film…….
My experience of factories was that the women swore like troopers. Any man that ran the gauntlet (unless management) was teased and groped within an inch of his life and they would all be prosected for sexual harassment nowadays.
Having started work aged 15 in the 1963 in the offices of a large Northern factory , workers numbers 15,000 at the time I can assure you that the women working on the shop floor did not swear neither did many of them smoke , both were considered extremely ” common ” and not to be done .
They were however ” grafters ” and were admired by the men and the managers for their hard work .
We were lucky ours was at that time a quaker run organisation who truly cared for its workers and for giving them a quality of life rather exceptional at that time and indeed now.
We had doctors nurses , dentists , youth club, Library, pensioners club, theatre , swimming baths , further education dept, billiards room ,a wonderful pension scheme ,
wonderful canteen where all food was subsidised and food taken out into the factory throughout the day on trollets full of sandwiches , scones cakes tea and biscuits ,music and requested records were played at regular intervals of the day .
There was even a large Victorian mansion at Scarborough where sick or out of hospital employees were sent free of charge for two weeks at a time to recuperate .Oh and of course a village built for the work force .
All gone now of course as it was sold to a large Swiss firm who gradually closed down all these benefits.
Happy days.
looks as though whoever was interviewing selected the workforce very carefully so as not to rock the boat.
i worked in a norther factory in 72 and it was just as Phillipa stated.
disaffected and Philipa, two very different experiences, thank you so much!