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neglected, developments has been the appearance of action groups which campaign around price rises in the shops.
One of the most successful of such groups, which succeeded in organising a considerable number of housewives, was the Nottingham Campaign Against Rising Prices, European history is full of examples of housewives fighting against rising prices. Nottingham itself was no exception. In the period prior to the defeat of Chartism, a whole series of incidents occurred-occupations, demonstrations and boycotts led by local women, protesting, and for the most part successfully, against increases in the cost of bread, cheese and meat.
The struggles in Nottingham today are of course a mere echo of these. But whether it was a matter of queueing up for bread when the harvest had failed or walking miles around the shops looking for 'special bargaining' so as make ends meet on a steadily shrinking budget, in the 1970's, one thing remains true: housewives can explode spontaneously and unexpectedly into the most militant collective struggle.
The Nottingham Experience The Nottingham Campaign Against Rising Prices was started towards the end of 1973 by a group of socialists in the Jocal Womens Liberation Group. Its initial aim was to unite housewives, trade unionists and womers liberationists into a campaign to draw attention to rising prices through the selective use of pickets, demonstrations and so on. An attempt was also made to impose local "price freezes' where possible by organising pickets and boycotts of shops well known for their high prices.
A boycott of Fine Fare, for example, over its 'marking up" of goods already on the shelf, so embarrassed the management that they issued a public promise to stop the practice and institute an enquiry. This was one of a number of street passers-by and wide coverage in local press and radio During the miners strike we made contact with housewives in Calverton, an isolated mining community in Nottinghamshire, where a similar campaign led by miner's wives during the "72 strike succeeded in reducing some prices, while freezing others at least for the duration of the strike.
Today, there is a functioning Prices Committee, composed of a dozen active housewives and trade unionists, and having the support of the Labour Party wards, trade union bodies and a number of tenants and housewives groups of the district. It has plans to continue the Campaign by attacking expensive and unnecessary packaging, and the speculative 'hoarding' of goods.
The Campaign has taken great care to mark itself off from groups such as the National Housewives Association, which attempt to lay the blame in a major way for inflation on the trade unions. It was the National Housewives Association which recently gave support to Mrs. Miller's anti-union activities at Cowley. Like the extreme-right, they try to paint the picture of the poor defenceless housewife caught between the twin battalions of big business and the unions. We say on the contrary, that the interests of all working class people lie in fighting with trade unionists against inflation, whether the form of struggle adopted be attacks on price rises or wage demands, and not against the unions as both Tory and Labour Governments suggest This is why very early on we adopted the slogan "defend living standards, freeze prices not wages", and why the campaig was launched at a Trades Council Rally in solidarity with the Miners and Shrewsbury building workers.
And we have pointed out that unions have fought not simply the effects of inflation through wage claims, they have sometimes taken action to stopprices rising as well. (So for
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The only industry with any tradition of equal pay in the nineteenth century was spinning. One reason for this was because in many cases whole families worked together and skilled male weavers unionised the rest of the workforce. In 1833 women spinners and power-loom weavers in Glasgow