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Considered as a great classic of working class and feminist ethnography in Britain, Women on the Line has recently been published in a new edition, 27 years after its original publication. Initially published under a pseudonym because the laws of England did little to protect authors against libel claims, the book describe in an autobiographical mode the immersion of a white intellectual in the universe of the automobile industry in the 1970s, characterized by authoritarian supervision, a high concentration of immigrant women, assembly lines and social conflicts. This paper explores the background of this political-activism-turned-sociological-survey by resituating it in the context of the second wave of British feminism and of its relation with working class culture.