Made in Dagenham
Why everyone from your mother to your local fascist will love it.
Eagerly marketed as a ‘feel-good film’, Made in Dagenham has ditched the dour kitchen sink realism you might expect, for a triumphant, heart-on-sleeve dramatisation of a strike that changed British history and the lives of British workingwomen. In 1968, 187 sewing machinists for the Dagenham Ford plant who had been reclassified as ‘unskilled’ and worked in poor conditions for less pay than their male co-workers, went on strike, demanding equal pay. They brought the Ford factory to a standstill and their action led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole gives the serious subject matter a light, somewhat Carry On feel and casts Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins in the lead role as sheepish strike leader Rita O’Grady who wins listeners over by speaking from the heart and blubbing uncontrollably. The original title for the film was We Want Sex, based on a real, chaotic mishap at the strikers’ Westminster demo, when the right-hand half of their banner reading “We Want Sexual Equality” folded, leading to much cheerfully supportive drive-by hooting.
The Unions don’t come off terribly well in the film, nor should they, as they were less than supportive of the women’s strike right up until the end. Karl Marx gets quoted twice. The theme song was written by Billy Bragg and performed by Sandie Shaw, herself a former Dagenham Ford worker. And yet somehow, this film will not bother, offend or challenge anyone and feels about as radical as eating lunch in café Mao or having a pint in The Workman’s Club.
The women find female solidarity across class lines and one of their biggest allies is fiery Barbara Castle, secretary of state for employment in Harold Wilson’s government who supported their strike when their male comrades and co-workers wouldn’t. Fighting male chauvinism is rendered as an apolitical cause, which every decent person can now get behind and the effect is as piercing as Titanic’s critique of the class system. David Cameron is probably raving about it.
The demand of the Ford women in 1968 was originally to re-grade their jobs from unskilled B grade to semi-skilled grade C. This demand was not won until another strike in 1984. Ironically, the Ford women had not been able to use the Equal Pay Act that they precipitated to win their re-grading, as they could not compare themselves to a man in their role; they could only claim that their skill level matched some men. The real cause of the pay gap between men and women was and remains women’s segregation into devalued ‘feminine’ jobs. Just as the Ford women had to fight to prove their worth, cleaners, carers, secretaries and full-time mothers today are battling as much against popular ideas about the value of what they do as they are against those who make money from their devalued labour.
Barely beneath the surface this is a deeply culturally conservative nostalgia film. It longs for, and will appeal to the audience’s longing for, a simple white parochial past in which everyone lives down ‘road from everyone else and cycles to work, where saint like industrial labourers desire only ‘what is right’ and where everyone is one teary-eyed speech away from supreme egalitarian consciousness. It was a world of good guys and bad guys in which sexism and snobbery asserted themselves in the most blatant terms imaginable. What does it say to the contemporary female ‘flexible’ knowledge economy worker who needs her employer more than her employer needs her because she can probably now be replaced by a 20 year old ‘intern’ who will do her work for free? Or the post-feminist school leaver who will vote, if at all, for the men who ensure she will live out her final years in poverty, who is constantly in debt but for now can buy more cosmetics and Hollywood waxes than the povos in Made in Dagenham? Unwittingly, it probably tells her she is lucky.
It may be that something as radical as this needed to be made so pallatable in order to get funding and have mainstream distribution and that if grumpy elitist film critics had it their way, cinema would only be considered radical when it is grim and impenetrable. Undeniably it is a great thing that this story has been told and that thousands of people who never knew about the Ford machinists now do. But Made in Dagenham still feels nothing like a call to arms and more like a part of ‘the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’.
Discussion
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Comment by: Tomboktu
Oct 5th 2010 at 21:10
Thank you. I had come away from the movie with an ill-defined feeling it was nice and twee but not all there for a movie that was so directly about a political issue. You’ve named the problems with it so clearly.
Comment by: Michelle
Oct 15th 2010 at 18:10
Great article. Whilst Sally Hawkins performed tremendously, the portrayal of the issues was very simplistic. But I wasn’t really expecting anything more.