Local authority strikes, like that of the Liverpool gravediggers, represented only one of the myriad actions deployed in British public sector unions’ co-ordinated actions during the Winter of Discontent. One key aspect of these disputes in particular, the involvement of women, has been relatively ignored in the literature. Women working for local authorities, from school meals workers to assistants in care homes for the elderly, began to reveal themselves as a robust industrial force in the midst of these upheavals. For decades, local authorities in Britain experienced a rapid growth in female employment. From 1949 to 1974, employment in local authorities had risen by 110 per cent, and by 1974, women made up 1.5 million out of the 2.5 million workers employed by local authorities in Britain. Most of the jobs women took with local authorities, however, were concentrated in low-paid, part-time, unskilled, and semi-skilled manual jobs. Since half of their entire membership was based in local authorities, NUPE was one of the leading public sector unions to confront the problems facing these women.

It was NUPE's mobilization of its female membership in local authorities, therefore, that profoundly shaped the nature of the strikes of the Winter of Discontent. NUPE began to energize their female membership at a time when dynamic new ideas of trade unionism, participatory democracy, and women's liberation had burst upon the political scene. The effect these larger social and political currents had on NUPE can most easily be understood by looking at key individuals involved in the union. By examining the evolution of their political identities in NUPE at this time one can begin to see that many of the changes in the union were rooted in broader shifts in the economy and political culture of 1970s Britain. National and local union leaders and activists alike were articulating a wider process of social transformation. This, in turn, shaped the local authority strikes of the Winter of Discontent. Again, the exceptionally frigid winter would not only underline the impact of these strikes, but would help to crystallize the resonance of this series of events in British collective memory.

The ability not merely to recruit, but to actively mobilize, working women required a radically new approach to organizing. NUPE had to contend with entrenched stereotypes of women workers as undercutting the male ‘breadwinner’ or simply earning ‘pin money,’ making many unions reluctant to organize them.