Stars: Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson, Rosamund Pike, Daniel Mays, Rupert Graves, Geraldine James, Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, Richard Schiff
Running time: 112 mins
Rating: ★★★★

THIS new film from Nigel Cole, the director of the equally femaledominated Calendar Girls, was originally known as We Want Sex. A title change has sensibly been made to ensure people aren’t disappointed to find this isn’t a sex comedy or porn movie but the story of a piece of industrial history unfamiliar to many.

That original title is taken from a banner by striking machinists at Ford’s Dagenham factory in 1968. It should have read WE WANT SEX EQUALITY – but the banner didn’t unfurl fully.

Little did those women realise that their actions would kick start the campaign to get equal pay for women.

Advised – well, egged on actually – by union shop steward Alfred Passingham (Bob Hoskins), they find themselves at the front of a campaign to treat women workers like their male equivalents.

They have to fight not only the unwillingness of management (Rupert Graves for the Brits, Richard Schiff for the Americans) to acknowledge their skills but also the backlash from the maledominated unions.

Sally Hawkins, the star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, is Rita, the mother who finds herself leading the women’s struggle – and proving very good at arguing the case and saying “Everybody out”. Jaime Winstone, who’d rather be a model than a machinist, and Geraldine James, as a union leader with a sick husband, are among those joining her on the picket line.

Help too comes from Parliament where Barbara Castle, newly-appointed secretary of state for employment, is fighting her own battles against Harold Wilson (John Sessions) and the maledominated Commons.

When workers and cabinet member come together it’s an immovable force that management, unions and minsters alike ignore at their peril.

As he did in Calendar Girls, Cole musters the womens’ fighting spirit to good effect with Hawkins giving a spirited performance as the ordinary woman fighting the good fight while running a home for husband and children.

Rosamund Pike is good too as the boss’s wife who comes to realise that, as an educated woman, she’s been reduced to doing the housework and other wifely duties. Miranda Richardson does a reasonable impersonation of the self-confessed fiery redhead that was the redoubtable Barbara Castle.

Made In Dagenham is a valuable reminder of not just Sixties fashions and music (including a song by Dagenham girl Sandie Shaw) but an industrial dispute that had global repercussions as the idea of equal pay for women took hold.