Daughters Job in a Coal Miners Family 1920s Eastern Kentucky
The Mine Wars | Article
Women in the Mine Towns
In the Mine Wars that erupted in southern Due west Virginia over the beginning two decades of the 20th century, coal miners and coal companies in West Virginia clashed in a series of savage conflicts over labor weather and unionization. The coal miners were a diverse group of men who came from farms in Appalachia, Eastern Europe, and the American South to brainstorm piece of work in the coalfields of W Virginia, where mines were opened in remote areas that often lacked existing towns. Coal companies established towns and imposed a organization of rules; miners could be evicted from their company-owned home if they broke the rules. The coal visitor officials believed that it was their right to command the management of the coalmines. Miners argued that they had the right to discuss unionization and join a union. Within this context, the union motility in southern West Virginia counted women amongst its strongest supporters and organizers.
Women in the early on 1900s were barred from working hole-and-corner in the coalmines, but their work above footing was integral to the coal army camp organization. In many cases, a wife'southward unpaid labor made it possible for the miner to do his job. Women prepared the food that the miners brought to piece of work, and they cleaned the miner's wearing apparel. They managed to support their children on what little pay the miner brought abode, oftentimes dealing with the monopolistic prices at the company store. Depending on the coal camp, they were tasked with hauling water from nearby creeks or h2o pumps up to their homes for drinking and bathing. Dissimilar women who worked in urban factories and lived in tenements, coal miner'due south wives lived at their married man's workplace -- the coal company often endemic the unabridged coal camp, including the miners' homes. They faced the looming threat of eviction, besides equally the chance that their husband or son might be severely injured or perish in the mine. As Chuck Keeney, bang-up grandson of labor organizer Frank Keeney, recalled during his 2014 interview for the documentary The Mine Wars, "these were women who had to deal with harsh circumstances, and they themselves had to have a certain type of toughness, not just physical toughness, merely a psychological toughness."
When strike organizers in the early 1900s decided to protestation the conditions in the coal camps, the strikes had a significant bear upon on the lives of women. Striking miners and their families were evicted from their company-owned homes and forced to alive in tent colonies set up past the union. The tents were erected on whatever private land could exist institute near the mines.
Thomas Andrews explained during his 2014 interview for The Mine Wars that "there was a purpose for these tent colonies beyond simply sheltering people. They were as well supposed to keep the pes soldiers in these strikes, the strikers, near the front lines." Women kept the strikers on the front end lines past supporting daily life in the tent colonies. They cooked, did washing, and raised children in the tents. Their commitment to the strike was not rhetorical; information technology meant a material modify in their daily lives.
In improver to conveying on their household duties in challenging strike circumstances, women also took action to protect the integrity of the strike. The success of the strike depended on the miners' ability to brand the company keenly aware of their absence and the loss of productivity, and to compel the company to make concessions in the interest of quickening the miners' return to work. However, coal companies in southern West Virginia, seeking to fulfill their contracts and maintain production, tried to replace the striking workers with new recruits called "transportation men." Wives and daughters would tear upward railroad train track, curse at the new recruits, and generally preclude them from entering the mines. Grace Jackson, interviewed during an oral history project in the 1970s, remembered women wielding guns when trains conveying new workers arrived: "The women and the men got their high-powered rifles, and they got on their bellies and laid on each side of the track... and when that train went through... they let one shot fire [and the transportation men] all turned loose."
Willie Helton, another woman living in the coalfields at that time, recalled using her dress equally effective comprehend for transporting guns: "And I slipped one gun downwards into my apparel on this side. I had ane gun on either side of me, and I had a pocket full of shells. I couldn't hardly walk." Both of these memories highlight the fact that both men and women were active participants in the labor conflict.
One of the nearly famous women in the southern West Virginia coalfields was not a miner or a miner's married woman. She was a woman named Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. Her husband and children'south deaths in the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867 left her without family obligations, and she devoted herself to fighting for workers' rights. She became involved with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and in speeches throughout the coalfields, Mother Jones utilized a visceral form of maternalist politics to abet for miners. Adopting the character of a universal mother, Jones questioned the courage and masculinity of coal miners who were reluctant to join the union. "If yous are too cowardly to fight, I will fight," she told coal miners on the steps of the capitol building in Charleston, Due west Virginia in 1912. To recalcitrant miners she added, "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves... to run into 1 quondam woman who is not agape of all the blood-hounds."
Mother Jones' and other female organizers' intellectual and political delivery to their cause invited sexist criticisms at the fourth dimension. A New York Times reporter expressed surprise in 1913 when he listed the contents of Mother Jones' bag: "comb and castor and pulverization puff. She has a powder puff. That, too, astonished me." Mother Jones' buying of a pulverization puff evidenced an interest in her advent that was at odds with the journalist'south expectations. If a female UMWA organizer like Fannie Sellins entered a coal military camp, she was chided that it was not a fit identify for any decent woman. Her interest in organizing the miners and her visits to coal camps in Collier, WV, precluded her, in the mind of a federal approximate, from being regarded as a moral woman. Sellins was later killed during a conflict with police while picketing with steelworkers in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania.
Mother Jones was perhaps the most notorious female labor organizer in the coal camps, but she certainly wasn't the simply vocal woman in the labor move. Pauline Newman started working at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company at the historic period of eight, and when the New York Metropolis factory burst into flames in 1911, she was out campaigning for worker rubber and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Spousal relationship (ILGWU) in Philadelphia and soon joined a federal group to investigate the burn down. As the number of women wage-earners increased, ascent by 43% from 1900 to 1910, there were also more possibilities for unionization. Women like Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian immigrant, proclaimed, "I am a working daughter... i of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions." Increasingly, women non only fought for better working and living conditions for men and children, but likewise for themselves.
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Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/minewars-women/