“Up Here We Come Straight Out of the Kitchen Sink”: The Role of Women’s Labour and Social Reproduction as Part of the UK 1984–85 Miners’ Strike

This article examines the relationship between social reproduction and civil society through the experiences of women involved in the 1984–1985 UK Miners’ Strike. Drawing on archival research and oral testimonies, it employs Social Reproduction Theory and Feminist Political Economy to challenge masculinist accounts of the strike and to foreground women’s often overlooked labour, including emotional support, food provision, and community organising. Rather than treating these activities as peripheral, the article argues that they constituted the material and ideological infrastructure that sustained collective resistance for almost a year. In doing so, it reconceptualises civil society as grounded in socially reproductive practices that enable communities to organise, endure, and resist during periods of crisis. The Miners’ Strike demonstrates how women’s reproductive labour underpinned forms of solidarity that compensated for state withdrawal, revealing social reproduction to be a critical dimension of civil society under conditions of neoliberal restructuring in Britain.