Red Clydeside

This essay will select some key events, to produce for the reader evidence that will suggest that a Revolution was overdue in the West of Scotland. The reality was that the Clyde experienced a revolution in which traditional structures were challenged, an awareness of class-consciousness identified and fractures between various factions of society highlighted.
Towards this end, the role of women is featured in this period. The rise of a political dimension that was more vociferous than ever before and issues of labour conflict, throws up several sub categories of Capital versus labour, ownership of work and the rights and roles of workers and management.
This essay will demonstrate these themes are related, the working class of the Clyde were suppressed and exploited by the establishment and Red Clydeside provided them a revolutionary voice. These were not people who would turn to anarchy to achieve their ends, but they would test the limits of the boundaries of their revolutionary credentials.
From the outset this revolutionary movement was not a common experience shared or subscribed to by all. Fischer and Know suggest too much attention was focussed the lives of male skilled Protestant workers.
Eleanor Gordon tries to redress this perceived bias by referring to the large number of strikes involving women and she challenges the notion of female quiescence and docility in industrial relations before the First World War. The table below shows that Scotland as a whole employed only half the percentage of married women of the British average. The Dundee figure suggests that women were more than willing to work if given the opportunity, made possible by the differing nature of industry in the North East, being dominated by Jute and confectionery.
Percentage of married women who worked, 1911 Scotland | Glasgow | Dundee | Edinburgh | Great Britain | 5.0 | 5.5 | 23.4 | 5.1 | 9.6 |
Source: Census of Great Britain and Scotland, 1911.

‘Given that the

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