Masculinities, Gender Equality and Crisis Management by Mathias Ericson Ulf Mellström

Author:Mathias Ericson, Ulf Mellström [Mathias Ericson, Ulf Mellström]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367349042
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Organising Women

Concerned about their isolation, some women started to meet up and develop a network to support each other. One female activist spoke to McGhee (2011) about how it was in the 1980s:

Genie: I made it my business to find out where other women were and just phoned them up to talk. I knew how important it was for me to have other women there so to have contact … And I disliked the sexism and the culture.

I have also spoken with a number of activists from that time; indeed to some extent I was part of it as a sexist serving firefighter who had considerable doubts about women joining my job. My view at the time was that women were social sexual objects who had no place amongst fire appliances or in firefighting. Nonetheless, there were others more enlightened than I on the FBU’s London Regional Committee (LRC) who established the Women’s Advisory Committee (22–9–1989). This gave women an avenue to raise their separate issues. Nonetheless, as is so often the case when senior men have supported women, incorporation involves compromise (see Kirton et al., 2010). The independent voices of women were in danger of being muted by male committees who required the final say on how to deal with women’s separate requirements.

A London EC member who was instrumental in helping to establish the women’s section in 1989 explained in an interview with me in 1995:

EC: Vast majority of our members are antagonistic towards equality or retain a very lumpen approach to equal ops in general … Levels of prejudice within the union that I am entirely unhappy with and that goes to the highest levels.

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