Forging Resistance: Women Welders, Workplace Coalitions, and Disruptions in Wartime Britain

Abstract

This article examines Yorkshire women welders' lived experiences during the Second World War through their correspondence with former mentor Valentine Pearson, preserved in the Mass Observation Archive. Analysing letters from women at David Brown's (Penistone) and Hopkinsons (Huddersfield), this study demonstrates how working-class women actively constructed professional identities whilst navigating male-dominated industrial spaces. Employing the framework of coalition and interruption, the article reveals how these women forged tactical alliances to challenge structural workplace barriers and disrupted entrenched gender hierarchies. Moving beyond historiographical debates framing women's wartime employment through liberation-versus-constraint binaries, this study positions welders as active agents exercising agency through collective resistance and individual defiance. The welders established informal coalitions contesting wage discrimination and workplace marginalisation, engaging in sustained negotiations with management whilst creating support networks against male hostility. They challenged gendered assumptions about technical competence by asserting professional skills and demanding recognition as 'fully skilled' workers. The correspondence reveals complex gender identity negotiations, exposing how women subverted feminine stereotypes through masculine-coded qualities—assertiveness and technical expertise—whilst navigating expectations of appropriate feminine behaviour. The article seeks to move beyond traditional historiographical debates, which frame women's wartime employment through a binary lens of liberation versus constraint. Instead, it positions these women as active agents who exercised agency within existing power structures through both collective resistance and individual acts of defiance. These findings contribute to feminist labour histories by illuminating everyday acts of solidarity and resistance that operated below the purview of official narratives, demonstrating the significance of informal networks and tactical agency in the wartime experiences of working-class women.