Iron Ladies (2025) dir. Daniel Draper was made for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 Miners' Strikes and is centred around the 'Women Against Pit Closures' group which was the backbone of the strike. The film tells the stories of these women and their movement which so often goes unsaid. It is a documentary consisting of interviews with women from all areas of 'Women Against Pit Closures' such as Durham, Kent, South Yorkshire, South Wales, Derbyshire, Fife and Aylesham.
These women were the movement, they protested, picketed, fundraised and fed the mining families of their towns throughout that year of strikes. We see the preparation meetings for the 40th anniversary in between interviews and clips from the women’s strikes.
'Women Against Pit Closures' in South Wales fed 1000 people, 5 days a week for a year; focused on the practical side of the strike such as money for political activity to sustain and feed people. They would provide food parcels for single miners as they received no benefits and would also provide welfare advice for what they could claim for the government as the miners had little knowledge of this.
There was a Q&A after the film in which director Daniel Draper and Heather Wood, one of the women behind the scenes offering strength and support in County Durham, attended. She stated “where those women had died, their daughters and their granddaughters joined us … they marched proud thinking of their grandmothers and their mothers who couldn’t be with us that day."
This shows how deep the impacts of the group run and how important it is that this film tells their story. She added, "everybody wanted to do something, everybody was up for it." Many more women were interviewed than appeared in the film which shows how involved the group was in the project.
I asked “What avenues would you recommend for students and young people to get involved in the area and the movement itself, how would they go about getting involved?”
Wood replied, “Go on Facebook. 'National Women’s Action for Positive Change', that will lead you to all the other groups… the network will start there and tell you what’s going on in your area.” With Laura Pidock adding, “Know that absolutely no one else deserves to be there more than you [young people] do.”