I did a master’s degree in gender studies at EHESS in Paris on the involvement of strikers’ wives in the Le Parisien Libéré strike (1975-1977) and the transmission of a memory of struggle to workers’ children. Then, in January 2024, I began my thesis on the various strikes from 1963 to the present day.
Project statement: Family on strike from 1963 to the present day
Maintaining a strike over time requires a series of acts of solidarity among the various actors in the labor movement. Every day, strikers’ wives provide various forms of unseen and hidden work, to enable the implementation of this solidarity: they organize supply actions, they cook strike meals, they raise funds… Yet few academic studies focus on the work these women do to keep the strike going. Dominated by gender and class, they are seen as “auxiliaries of the struggle” (Kergoat, 2012) by trade unions and communist organizations. What’s more, their assignment to “reproductive work” (Walby, 1989) modifies and affects their relationship to militancy and commitment. This doctoral research therefore raises the following question: what is the role of strikers’ wives in building workers’ solidarity during strikes? Part of this research will also focus on the transmission of the memory of strike practices and militant capital from parents to their children, and the reception of this memory by heirs. This doctoral research focuses on the historiography of three strikes : the miners’ strikes in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (1963-1970), the November-December 1995 movement against the Juppé reform in Sotteville–Lès-Rouen (postal services and SNCF repair workshops), and the contemporary strikes in refineries from 2021 to 2023. These social movements are examined on the basis of interviews with participants and studies of personal, union and public archives. The originality of this research lies in the use of gender studies as a tool to analyze workers’ struggles.
