The great Brittany sardine strike of 1924, a milestone for working women
One hundred years ago this month, labourers in fish canning factories on France’s north-west coast held a strike that has gone down in history as one of the earliest examples of women successfully mobilising to demand their working rights.
Hugging a bay in Finistère, where northern France juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, the picturesque port of Douarnenez doesn’t look like an obvious hotbed of industrial revolt. But the town's jumbled alleyways are the legacy of a boom that packed the town with working women and opened a new chapter in the movement for their rights.
A hundred years ago, Douarnenez was a town in flux. Fishing had been its lifeblood for centuries, but with the invention of canning, suddenly its sardine catches could reach markets previously unimaginable.
The ports of Brittany became the beating heart of France’s tinned fish industry, Douarnenez chief among them. In the space of 50 years its population soared from around 2,000 inhabitants to more than 14,000, with dozens of new canneries drawing in labourers from inland.
Most of these workers were women. While men and boys caught the fish, women and girls were responsible for cleaning, frying and packing it. It was wet, noisy, reeking, back-breaking work, and it continued around the clock.
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None of this was fairly compensated. Lacking the protection of unions or effective labour laws, women were a cheap workforce for factory bosses – who were known to employ girls as young as nine or ten as well as adults in their eighties.
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