Striking a Light: Celebrating women in trade unions
An event to mark the centenary of International Womens Day
Saturday 5 March 2011, 2pm. Free.
Working Class Movement Library, 51 Crescent Salford M5 4WX
Speakers: Louise Raw and Lynn Collins.
Chair: Bernadette Hyland
Louise will speak about the Matchwomen’s Strike of 1888
Lynn will speak about women in trade unions to-day
In the summer of 1888, 1,400 matchwomen walked out of the Bryant & May’s factory and into history The story of this unexpectedly successful strike is well-known; yet the matchwomen themselves are curiously silent in it. Louise’s own experience as a trade union activist led her to question this version of events. In a ten-year search for the women behind the myths, she met and interviewed people who had known them and wrote a book Striking a Light, published in 2009.
Lynn Collins is Regional Official (FE) for the University and College Union in the North West. She has been a trade union activist all her working life and has previously served on the TUC women’s Committee and represented the TUC in Europe and on the Government’s soon to be abolished Women’s National Commission. She lives in Liverpool with her two children.
The event will be chaired by Bernadette Hyland who is a political activist and shop steward for UNITE,
International Women’s Day was first celebrated on 19 March 1911 following at resolution proposed by two German Socialists, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin, at the Socialist Women’s conference in Copenhagen the previous year. In the years since it has developed into a major celebration in many parts of the world and was given new life by the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s.
Every year on International Women’s Day the Working Class Movement Library celebrates the work and achievements of women in the labour, socialist and feminist movements of the past 200 years.
More information at www.wcml.org.uk
Email; enquiries@wcml.org.uk
Telephone: 0161-736-3601
Leave a Reply