ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 6, women feel more confident and empowered after completing a women-only course, but does this help them develop and sustain their union careers over time? This chapter continues to follow the MSF and TGWU interviewees by investigating the trajectories of their union careers approximately two years after attending the women’s schools using data from second interviews. There is no attempt to establish a causal relationship between attendance of women’s schools and particular union career outcomes. However, the chapter does attempt to unravel the longer-term influence of the social processes women engage with during women-only courses. In particular, whether there is any perceived lasting impact from the sense of empowerment or increased confidence that the vast majority of interviewees clearly feel directly after the courses. Chapter 5 discussed the women’s orientations to feminism, finding that only a minority of interviewees self-identified unequivocally as feminists. That said all the women were supportive of the feminist goal of women’s equality, but some were more ambivalent about feminist practices such as women’s separate organizing. This chapter explores whether and how having engaged with a gender conscious (if not overtly feminist) discourse within the ‘safe space’ of the women’s schools, this then seemed to shape women’s subsequent and developing gender identity, feminist orientation, behaviour, and contribution to trade union work. The discussion is situated within the work, union and personal contexts in which the interviewees’ participation takes place so as to show the interconnections between these three ‘worlds’ and to explore how the women navigated them. The chapter first considers the circumstances of women who ceased or did not begin to participate and it then turns to women who went on to develop a union career.
