‘Politics of protest’: the personal and the political in Maggie Gee’s “May Hobbs: a story on the Night Clearners’ Strike

Abstract

Maggie Gee’s “May Hobbs: a story on the Night Cleaner’ Strike” (2017) helps to rescue from oblivion the role May Hobbs played in forming the Cleaners Action Group (CAG), which received the support of the Women Liberation Movement (WLM). I argue that this short story is a politically committed text which addresses main aspects of the Campaign such as issues of representation, class divisions and sisterhood alliances, to emphasise the different ways in which the personal is indeed political.