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Women in the Mines informs, provokes and inspires from first page to last with gripping stories from coalfield women from 1914 to 1994. Early women miners describe handloading coal to help their families survive. The 1970s generation talks openly about sexual harassment, community attitudes, pregnancy, health and safety, racism, aging, and unemployment. The stories demonstrate the strength and resilience of women who accepted the challenge of nontraditional work and the changes in their lives brought by that decision.
In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and markets intensively, making substantial profits without the burdens of extensive mechanization. This unique b...
Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.
Women have long been recognised as the backbone of coalmining communities, supporting their men. Less well known is the role which they played as the industry developed, working underground or at the pit head. The year 2012 is the 170th anniversary of the publication of the Report of the Second Childrens Employment Commission. The report caused public outrage in May 1842, revealing that halfdressed women worked underground alongside naked men. Three months later, to protect them from moral corruption, females were banned from working underground. The Commissions report has been neglected as a historical source with the same few quotations widely used to illustrate the same headline points. A...
Triona Holden takes the reader into the lives of the remarkable women involved in the coal strikes in Great Britain in 1984-85, revealing that what was good about the mining communities lives on in these women's articulate, funny and frank stories.
Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.
We tend to think of coal mining as predominantly a male occupation, with women confined to roles as wives and support workers. Women worked at the coal face for many years before they were banned in 1842. However, mere legislation was not going to stop them - many continued to work underground, with mine owners making little attempt to stop them due to the low wages paid to women. Some would dress and pass as men to fool visiting inspectors. For the majority though, they worked on the pit brow where they received the coal, cleaned, sorted and cut it to uniform size. Dirty, laborious work, including many accidents and deaths, done by women and girls, some as young as 10 years old. Society was...
This novel offers a powerful account of family life and labor conflicts, told through the eyes of a tough, resilient Appalachian woman who is, according to Richard Wright, "one of the most impressive proletarian characters in our literature." Daughter of the Hills exposes the economic conditions of the working class and the scarcity of opportunities for working-class women, but also tells the story of a loving marriage that endures despite severe hardships.
The success of the Durham Coalfield and its important role in the Industrial Revolution is attributed to men of influence who owned the land and the pits, and men who worked in the coal-mining industry during the Victorian period. There has been very little written about the importance of the home life that supported the miners - their wives who, through heroic efforts, did their best to provide attractive, healthy, happy home for their husbands, often in appalling social conditions. To provide a welcoming atmosphere at home demanded tremendous resources and commitment from the miners' wives. Despite their many hardships these women selflessly put everyone in the family before themselves. They operated on less rest, less food at times of necessity and under the huge physical burden of work and the emotional burden of worry concerning the safety of their family. Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 19th Century: Hannah's Story addresses the lack of information about the role of women in the Durham Coalfield, engagingly explored through one woman's experience.
The pit brow lasses who sorted coal and performed a variety of jobs above ground at British coal mines prompted a violent debate about women’s work in the nineteenth century. Seen as the prime example of degraded womanhood, the pit brow woman was regarded as an aberration in a masculine domain, cruelly torn from her ‘natural sphere’, the home. The, attempt to restrict women’s work at the mines in the 1880s highlights the dichotomy between the fashionable ideal of womanhood and the necessity and reality of female manual labour. Although only a tiny percentage of the colliery labour force, the pit lasses aroused an interest out of all proportion to their numbers and their work became a test case for women’s outdoor manual employment. Angela John discusses the implications of this debate, showing how it encapsulates many of the ambivalences of late Victorian attitudes towards working-class female employment, and at the same time raises wider questions both about women’s work in industries seen as traditionally male enclaves, and about the ways in which women within the working community have been presented by historians.This book was first published in 1980.