Made in Dagenham - success or failure?

The 1968 Ford sewing machinists strike in the Dagenham factory was not as successful as the movie by director Nigel Cole depicts it to be, but it was not a complete failure either. Author Beatrix Campbell states that “those women almost triumphed (...) [and she] heard a narrative that has been muted” (Campbell, 2010). She explains that although the strike resulted in the introduction of an equal pay act this did not honour what the women stood for, and it was, according to the author, merely a placating measure to avoid a bigger crisis. The strike was a complete failure for Germaine Greer, and she so points out in her article “We do not hear of women rocking the corporate boat now”. She goes on to say that the women’s jobs had been downgraded from semi-skilled to unskilled, which represented a lower rate of pay for them, and “it was another 16 years before the machinists of Dagenham could get the status of their jobs upgraded to semiskilled” (Greer, 2010). She also considers that the women were “bought off” with momentary solutions that did not add up to anything durable in the long run. However negative/grim the outcome of this strike might look, there is also a bright side, which Campbell brings up in her article when she says “feminism is stirring again and the chronicle of those nice, dangerous women is being aired all over the place” (Campbell, 2010). What this points to is that although this strike did not achieve the particular goals of the sewing machinists, it did contribute to directing the public gaze towards feminist issues that would not have been heeded otherwise.