Working for Equality: The Fight for Fair Pay and Equal Rights


This project explores changing ideas about the ‘proper place’ for a woman and celebrated the economic, cultural, and political contribution of women factory workers.

With the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, in 2018-19 we created a mobile exhibition, put on a range of accessible public events, ran workshops with local schools, and collected oral histories from women who were working in factories in Barking & Dagenham between WWII and the Ford Strikes in 1968. Volunteers from the local area helped to shape the exhibition and received training in oral history, archive research, and heritage interpretation skills.

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The exhibition has been hosted in different venues in Barking & Dagenham, including summer festivals, Barking Learning Centre and Dagenham Library. If you’d like to host it at your venue please contact get in touch.

Developed and delivered in partnership with Eastside Community Heritage, and funded by Heritage Lottery Fund.

 
 

The Equal Pay Act 1970: 50 years on

In 2020 we looked back on 50 years since the moment women were no longer legally allowed to be paid less than men, with the passing of the Equal Pay Act. The brave actions of the Ford Dagenham strikers were a significant step towards this. Find out more the with our introductory guide to the Equal Pay Act, and a look at pay disparity that remains today.

 

Project Background- 'Women's work'

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2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the famous strike by women sewing machinists at the Ford motor factory in Dagenham, which inspired the Equal Pay Act 1970.

The 1968 strike was a major milestone in the fight for equal pay and has become a symbol of 20th century women’s activism, as well as a source of local pride in the borough of Barking & Dagenham, and in east London more widely.

Yet there’s an untold story of working women’s activism that can be traced back from that event over the previous five decades, to the end of the First World War and another women’s rights milestone: the Representation of the People Act. This act awarded women over 30 the right to vote.

Our project focused on women’s factory histories in Barking and Dagenham and explored the threads connecting the suffragettes to the Ford strikers.

Starting with suffragette equal pay campaigns and the wartime ‘munitionettes’ who found themselves pushed out of ‘men’s jobs’ in 1918, there is a visible pattern in this 50 year window: women factory workers were hailed as heroic in wartime, but in peacetime met intense pressure from politicians, employers, and union leaders to go ‘back to the home’. It didn’t matter if it was their home or someone else’s; in 1920 benefit sanctions were introduced for women who turned down a job in domestic service.

Although women contributed to the war effort in the 1910s and the 1940s as engineers, chemical analysts, and industrial physicists, in peacetime they were steered away from skilled, technical, and management roles towards dull, repetitive work on the assembly line, routinely faced sexual harassment and discrimination (which was even worse for women of colour), were expected to resign or were dismissed when they got married or became pregnant, and were paid half a man’s wages to boot.

Despite this, factory work offered successive generations of young working class women freedom and camaraderie, as well as opportunities to agitate for better pay and conditions.

ABOUT US

The East End Women’s Museum is a public history project aiming to record, share, and celebrate women’s stories and voices from east London’s history. The project was established in 2015 in response to the 'Jack the Ripper Museum', as a positive, sustainable protest.

Eastside Community Heritage was established in 1993 as part of the Stratford City Challenge community history project and became an independent charity in 1997. Over the years, Eastside have worked with over 900 community groups, produced over 100 exhibitions, and created the East London Peoples Archive which contains over 3500 oral histories.

Thanks to National Lottery players, the Heritage Lottery Fund invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about - from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife.