Protesting with, not against a monument : women’s activism and the Women of Steel, Sheffield, UK

Peniston-Bird, Corinna (2025) Protesting with, not against a monument : women’s activism and the Women of Steel, Sheffield, UK. Journal of Gender Studies, 7 (3). ISSN 0958-9236

Abstract

In 2016, a monument to the female steel workers of South Yorkshire, who had worked in the local factories and steel mills in the World Wars was unveiled in Sheffield, England. Rooted firmly in Sheffield’s industrial past and the national memory of the wars, the monument began as an act of recognition of this group of working women’s contributions to the war effort. It swiftly became more. Since its unveiling, Women of Steel has been mobilized in multiple acts of activism for such diverse causes as the ordination of women in the Church of England, gender-based violence, and as a battle ground for antagonistic views on what is denoted by the term ‘woman’. This mobilization is remarkable in the histories of gender, place, commemoration, and activism for being conceived by activists as in alignment with, not antagonistic to the meanings of the monument. This paper offers the first academic analysis of Women of Steel, uncovering how and why a monument erected without attendant controversy was swiftly adopted in activism for diverse gendered causes. The paper explores the interplay between gender and time, the denotation of design, and the associative connotations of the monument and the spaces it inhabits.