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During the 1970's--a decade that produced affirmative-action policies and one of the biggest U.S. coal booms in a half-century--American women first crossed coal mine portals to claim high-wage mining jobs. Several thousand women became rank-and-file miners, achieving equal pay and accepting equal risk to life and limb, before massive layoffs in the 1980s diminished their numbers. As miners, women challenged centuries-old superstitions held by male coworkers who believed that women's presence underground could bring disaster. Women miners became a role model for American women pioneering in nontraditional fields and emerged as activists in the United Mine Workers of America and in their nonprofit organization, the Coal Employment Project.
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. Complemented by an historical introduction, afterword, and appendices, this collection of nearly two dozen oral histories describes a unique and important chapter in U.S. social and labor history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marat Moore is an award-winning journalist and photographer who worked as an underground miner in Mingo County, West Virginia. She is the former associate editor of the United Mine Workers Journal and won the Max Steinbock Award for labor journalism. She grew up in east Tennessee and currently lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.
JUNE 1996
337 pages - 39 illustrations
0-8057-7834-9 - Hardcover - $32.95
Twayne Publishers, an imprint of Simon, Schuster Macmillan
Foreword by Donald Ritchie, U.S. Senate Historical Office
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