A Voss and Pike Casefile: The Early Days
Section 50: Half the Town
Rook took the case, and your whole picture of it: the man, the sale, the Chamber, the minutes. Penhale confessed, Ward resigned and Rudd walked free into the cold air, blinking like a man let out of a dark room. The cannery went to a workers’ trust, run by the strike committee, every member of it a man.
The packers kept their grade. “The men’s vats are the heart of the works,” the trust explained, in a letter with a very good letterhead, and nobody on the committee had thought to ask what the women’s work was the heart of. Lilian Crane’s books went to the trust’s accountant without a word of thanks. Ruth Haddow read the letter in the shed, folded it once, and put it in her apron.
“We fixed it,” said Jonah, on the way home.
You looked back at the strike hut, its door hanging open, the tea rota still pinned inside it, in the same neat capitals. “We fixed half of it,” you said.
Sociological note: The conflict explanation was largely right and still incomplete: a class-only analysis left gender inequality in both the workplace and the home intact. Marxist and radical feminists argue that patriarchy and capitalism interlock, and that women's work is undervalued in the public and private spheres alike.