Made in Dagenham: Working Class Heroines

L. Quart: Dagenham’s Heroines

IT’S NOT the best of times in Great Britain. The unemployment rate is 7.7 percent, house foreclosures are up, and so is the deficit. A spanking new, PR-conscious version of the Tories is in power, but massive cuts to social services and spending–cuts that may eviscerate the British welfare state–are still their stock in trade. After its recent election defeat, the Labour Party will need some time to fashion a viable alternative economic and political program, under its new leader Ed Miliband, before it can return to power. The British unions lack the clout, energy, and membership they once had, and working-class culture and communal life are becoming more and more fragmented with each passing decade.

However, the British film industry continues to make mainstream films that portray the working class as warm, feisty, and possessed by a sense of solidarity, despite its economic plight. I can recall films like Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997) that depicted a working class facing hard times and unemployment, but that still preserved a semblance of its traditional style and culture. That was probably a wishful fantasy at the end of the twentieth century–in a Britain that was less rooted and more mobile, but also more economically unequal. But in these films a residue of collective feeling allows the working-class characters to conclude on a relatively upbeat note, even though there are no real victories, and they never do get their jobs back.

Nigel Cole, who previously made a popular piece of forgettable fluff with Helen Mirren about a group of women who posed nude to raise money for charity, Calendar Girls (2004), has directed the much better, primary-colored Made in Dagenham. It’s basically a comic film that resurrects yet again the image of a spirited, indomitable English working class. In this version the heroines are all women who work in the seat-cover division of the Ford plant in the East London suburb of Dagenham in 1968. They are offered a new contract that classifies them as unskilled workers (though they do intricate, difficult work), while the male autoworkers, who work on an assembly line, are classified as skilled and receive higher pay. They decide then to go on strike.

The women’s leader is an ordinary, low-key, apolitical housewife, Rita O’Grady (Happy Go Lucky’s Sally Hawkins), who thrown into this new role suddenly discovers a clear, confident voice and a passionate commitment to women’s rights. She has the active support and encouragement of one sympathetic man, the factory’s sweet-tempered shop steward, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), the film’s one male proto-feminist. There are other woman among the workers who play supportive roles–one a sweet aspiring bikini model, and another the sexually aggressive and liberated Brenda (Andrea Riseborough), both of whom serve as eye candy for the audience. There is also the beautiful, well-dressed, Oxbridge-educated Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the submerged wife of a smugly sexist, unintelligent Dagenham Ford head executive. Lisa becomes an ally (a bit too neatly) of Rita’s, in a friendship supposed to demonstrate that social class can easily be transcended when women choose to combat sexism.

Every man in the film except Albert is an unthinking chauvinist, like the self-serving, hypocritical head of the union local Monty Taylor (Kenneth Cranham), who while offering shopworn bromides to the women caves into management. The left-wing heads of the union are no better, calling the women “comrades” but subordinating the women’s demand to the needs of male workers. Rita’s husband Eddie, a decent lug, tries hard to be supportive but becomes resentful when he feels she’s neglecting her domestic role. (He does embrace her cause in the end.) There’s also the harsh, hardball-playing American troubleshooter sent from Ford’s home office to try to break the strike. Even the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, makes an appearance, acting evasive and craven.

So in this film men are either villains or peripheral figures–it’s the women who are central. Made in Dagenham is a homage to a group of working-class women who find within themselves the strength to take on Ford Motors, without the backing of their union or the Labour Party. The one politician who came to their aid is “the fiery redhead” Barbara Castle (an acerbic, sharp Miranda Richardson)–a dynamic, hardheaded pragmatist who believed in the transformative nature of socialism. She was the secretary of state in the Wilson administration, but in the film she chooses her sisters rather than her government and what is politically safe. (Ford threatens at one point to pull its factories from Great Britain.) The principled Rita and her fellow workers win the strike for equal pay, a victory that indirectly led two years later to the Equal Pay Act of 1970–a true victory for all British women.

Made in Dagenham is without a scintilla of subtlety or ambiguity; it’s also both entertaining and uplifting. It’s a film that pulls out all stops to seduce the audience. It predictably throws in a dollop of soap opera with the suicide of one of the striker’s husbands, and a number of scenes come straight from conventional sitcoms–Rita’s husband floundering at domesticity and burning all the food, and the running joke of Castle constantly berating her two dimwitted aides. None of those bits of business works, but this happy, shallow film leaves you remembering that the working class was once a force to reckon with.

Leonard Quart is in the process of co-authoring a fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.