‘Good girls can also go on strike’ – the nurses’ strike of 2008

Abstract

In 2008 we experienced perhaps one of the most substantial conflicts within the public sector, and with that in a number of the female-dominated fields. Nurses, social workers, pedagogues, and many others refused to accept the settlement proposal in the wage negotiations and went on strike. A strike which for the nurses lasted almost nine weeks, and resulted in a higher wage increase of 13,3%, than the original proposal of 12,8%. The authors of this article have, through observations and interviews, examined how the nurses who went on strike challenged male dominance, as understood by Bourdieu (1999). The specific results obtained by the women and the unions differed. However, in addition to the economic outcome, another development occurred among the women. New issues were discussed, the women behaved different from how they were used to behave, they used their bodies differently, and they looked at each other in a different light. Many of them broke their personal boundaries and did things they would have never thought they would dare to do. In this way they did challenge male dominance. The women managed to show that they were not merely passive, sweet, and good girls, but that they were capable of going on strike and acting collectively. In these ways they put the question of gender equality on the agenda. The male dominance was, however, reestablished in other ways during the strike, via the unions as well as through the women themselves. While the unions made collective action possible for the women, at the same time they contributed to a limitation of the challenge to the male dominance attempted by the women. Through symbolic violence, the women themselves contributed to the creation and recreation of male dominance.