Director: Daniel Draper
One of the most significant events in postwar history, the Miner’s Strike of 1984 has fundamentally shaped Britain today as the consequences of deindustrialisation and the failure to support regeneration projects in former mining areas has created an entrenched feeling of abandonment. But among the male-focused pain captured in popular culture, Daniel Draper’s new documentary Iron Ladies reveals the important role that women activists played in supporting and sustaining the Strike. This engaging 100-minute documentary interviews many of the women who were there and places their contribution in a lifetime of political protest, revealing the deep scars that remain.
One of the strengths of Iron Ladies is the much longer context of female activism that the film provides, heading back to the strikes in the early 1970s when a 3-week strike resulted in no coal for schools in which many of the women interviewed previously protested as well as discussing the beginnings of their political awareness, from family inheritance and histories of Trade Unionism to other forms of working-class protest that shaped the consciousness of interviewees. Draper presents a combined social and political history not only of the long-running dispute between the miners and shifting government policy across the decade before the 1984 Strike, but also the day-to-day experience of living through it as a community.
Part of that focus explores the implications for women who actively picketed and became the centre of community organisation, raising funds and supporting suffering families. One of the strongest aspects of Iron Ladies is the gender-based judgement that women received from older generations of women in their towns and villages who questioned the picketers motivations, insisting they were failing as mothers and wives by not staying home to look after their children – it’s an argument that feels ridiculous in 2025 but adds a heightened aspect to the story of activists who risked a great deal to support the miners. But as one contributor notes, “I didn’t fight in 1984 for nothing” and decades later remains proud of what was achieved.
Some of those achievements include huge amounts of fundraising with moving stories of international support among working-class communities including Christmas presents in 1984 supplied by French mining communities and 3 Deutsch marks taped to a letter from a 7-year-old in Germany and plenty of food parcels, even a donation from Bruce Springsteen. Draper structures the film by mining area, talking to women from Kent, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire among others, and Iron Ladies notes that the contributors were not only miner’s wives with a vested interest but other women who felt strongly for a multitude of reasons which the film explores.
Interestingly Margaret Thatcher doesn’t appear and is not mentioned for nearly 55-minutes – and the women here may not be terribly happy being badged with Thatcher’s moniker- but the activists are equally scathing about what they felt was the betrayal of Neil Kinnock, although the film expects the audience just to understand this political context 40 years later and there there is too little exposition. But interviewed in 2024, it’s clear that the issues are no less emotive now than they were in 1984 and the film has nothing but admiration for women who fought not only the government but also the gendered expectations of their community; the scars still run deep.
Iron Ladies will be in UK Cinemas from 10th October.
