‘We were just women who did things that needed done’: women’s grassroots care activism in 1970s Glasgow

This article explores women's grassroots care activism in the 1970s through the early days of a play scheme, the Jeely Piece Club, founded in Castlemilk, Glasgow, in 1974. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival material, it demonstrates how working-class women engaged in co-operative forms of community organising centred around social reproduction, which privileged their experiences and encouraged self-confidence. This grassroots action challenged paternalistic and uneven enactment of urban and welfare policy and territorial stigmatisation, and built networks which animated future activism. While this activism developed in tandem with wider political organising and the Women's Liberation Movement, it was not directly remembered as part of these movements. Instead, women's subjectivities composed in oral history interviews demonstrate that intersecting experiences of class, gender and place should be considered when understanding how these grassroots movements developed in this era. The article offers new insights into late twentieth-century urban activism centred around care, housing and collaboration which resisted the gendered inequalities of territorial stigmatisation, enacted through social reproduction. It brings histories of feminism together with accounts of tenant and community action in post-war Britain, arguing that examination of the local and the personal diversifies and deepens an understanding of women's activism.