‘But it’s an awfully, awfully slow process’: Women and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), 1960-1989
This thesis analyses the relationship between women workers in the British film and television industries and their trade union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), between 1960 and 1989. This thesis contributes a longitudinal case study of an individual union to the British historiography on women’s trade union participation to consider the relationship between women and the ACTT through periods both of militancy and inertia. To do so, this thesis combines an analysis of archival material and oral history testimony in line with feminist research practices. This thesis makes an original contribution in its examination of archival material which has not been analysed by other academics, specifically COE meeting minutes and ephemera, as well as new oral history interviews conducted by the author with ACTT women activists. This thesis addresses three central themes: the operation of the ACTT’s gendered union structure, women’s activism within such structures, and the relationship between class and gender in the ACTT. The union operated as a pre-entry closed shop which regulated employment in the British film and television industries, and so the gendered union structure significantly informed women’s experiences of work in film and television production. This thesis argues that the ACTT’s profoundly gendered union structure was institutionalised from its establishment and maintained through a belief system that women’s issues were not trade union issues. This thesis contends that separate self-organisation was integral to women’s activity within this gendered union structure, as it demonstrates in relation to the ACTT’s Committee on Equality (COE), established in 1973. Furthermore, it emphasises the importance of external feminist allies to women’s activity within the ACTT; for instance, it argues that the London Women’s Film Group played a crucial role in the establishment of the COE. This thesis argues that class differences between middle-class women in film and television production and working-class women in the laboratories informed the direction of women’s activity within the ACTT. This thesis is structured chronologically, with the ACTT’s seminal report on gender discrimination in the workplace, Patterns of Discrimination Against Women in the Film and Television Industries (1975), situated at the centre of its analysis. The aims of this thesis are fulfilled by its investigation of the strategies adopted by women activists to advance their gender-specific demands and the operation of the gendered union structure to marginalise these demands.
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