ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce the working-class women who worked in industry and the women trade union leaders who usually spoke for them. Studies of women workers in both World Wars reveal the concern of governments to emphasise the temporary nature of any changes in the situation of women as workers and to reinforce the notion that they "were 'really' wives and mothers". During the Second World War women entered industry in large numbers and challenged many of the conventions attached to the separate positioning of women and men in society, belief in the private/public divide remained firm. The chapter argues that during the 1960s there was a significant effort by some of the interest groups, and particularly by the women trade union leaders who represented industrial women workers, to change the historical construction that deemed women workers generally as being out of place in the public sphere of paid labour.
