Coalmining Women

While examining a range of early examples of filmic history, we made a discovery: A ten minute film entitled “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” (1910, produced by the Kineto Company for the L.N.W. Railway) presents surprising details of the multiple tasks of heavy labor performed by women at the Wigan Coal and Iron Works. In fact, at least half of the scenes of this ten minute documentary foreground women and their labors. According to this film, in 1910, women pushed full carts of coal, piled support beams, sorted through coal pieces on a conveyor belt, and worked on the top of coal cars, all while dressed in head scarves, loose-fitting skirts and dresses covered with leather aprons. These images of women coal workers served to highlight the documentary’s goal—coal coheres the family and builds the nation—but they also served as images of resistance—resistance by women against stereotypical gender roles.

Images of women coal workers in “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” highlight women’s most powerful resistance, working in and around coal mines in stereotypically male roles. Women have worked in coalmines since mining began. In fact, women worked in coalmine shafts in England, Scotland and Wales until an 1842 law restricted their labor underground, but women continued to work at the mine works until the onset of World War I. In the United States, images of women coal miners, even in Harlan County, Kentucky, come up on Websites that tell us women returned to the mines as workers in the late 1970s, when Harlan County USA came out. Although North Country tackles a sexual harassment case connected with a woman’s move into an iron ore strip mine, we believe the 1981 documentary, Coalmining Women, best illustrates this return to the mines. We assert that this image of the woman coal miner has been neglected and should be viewed as an image of resistance more powerful than protest.

“A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” provides a picture of coalmining from the perspective of the L.N.W. Railroad and the Wigan Coal and Iron Company, Limited. Images of a coalminer leaving a wife and two children for work and returning home after a day underground, then, serve as advertisements for the value of coal: it pays men (and women) wages, builds strong families and a strong nation, and warms homes of rich and poor. Colin Harding and Simon Popple argue that the film “drew clear parallels between the hard physical nature of the coalminers’ work and the luxury of those who relied on their toil” (44-5). But the film reveals more about mining works in 1910 than a “reality creatively shaped” (Kino) to serve the company’s purposes. The film does foreground a sole male miner at its beginning and end, but much of the ten-minute film highlights work done above ground—mostly by women.

Once the miner leaves his warm family, the film cuts to “The Pit Head” and pans the coal works, showing two women pushing a coal cart in the distance. Men are fore-grounded in the next three scenes: “Locking the Lamps,” “Miners Descending” and “Working the Coal Face.” But once the coal comes up from the mines (in “The Coal Shaft 4 and 9 Tub Cages”) women (with the occasional boy) serve as the film’s focus. After an introduction to the multitude of women workers in a posed photograph—“Belles of the (Black) Diamond Field”—the rest of the film’s center shows us “Female Industry.” Women push carts in pairs dressed in a uniform of skirts, leather aprons, blouses, and head-scarves. They load and push carts filled with support timbers, and they work the coal in a segment entitled “Sorting, Screening, and Loading.” From the works to the coal cars on long trains, women work with coal. The frame scenes of the sole miner returning to his family (as clean as when he left, we might add) and a rich man’s family warming themselves beside a coal fire may reinforce the company’s message—coal makes families strong. But from a twenty-first-century perspective, images of women (in 1910) working at the mine subvert the visions of a patriarchal family the film’s frame shots illustrate.

Women in “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” seem to play the traditional roles of wife and mother (in either a working-class or rich family). But the majority of women highlighted in the film work outside of the home in back-breaking jobs (although, ironically, only men line up for pay during the “Pay Time” scene). With faces blackened by coal dust and arms muscled by labor, the women of “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” resist the roles the film’s message would provide them—building a life around a nuclear family where women stay home to care for husband, children, and their household. These images of resistance comprise at least fifty percent of the film and the majority of scenes of work around the mine, leading us to question the power of the film’s frame message centering on a nuclear family.

             “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” advertises mining and its benefits to society, but it also shows us images of labor at a mine works on all levels and, perhaps naively, reveals the extent of that work that is accomplished by women. This film stands out as a film where women and their work takes the center: working-class women work at the mine; at least one miner’s wife works in the home rearing children; and another works as a servant for a middle- or upper-class family in the film’s last scene. Only one woman escapes labor, the upper-class wife and mother served by the working-class domestic. Women working at the colliery may be represented as unmarried or widowed because they—unlike the clean wives and mothers wearing starched white in both the working-class and middle-class homes—are “veiled” in head scarves and covered in coal. Yet Victorian values that stimulate positive depictions of the traditional family still seem subverted by so many images of women hard at work. What is missing from the short film are some of the consequences of women’s labor. The work these women performed was dangerous and possibly fatal. Also missing are methods of payment for these women. In fact, during the pay-time sequence, only men line up for their pay. Women presumably “donated” their earnings to a male patriarch—a father, a husband, or even a brother. Women worked, but they had fewer rights than their male counterparts. Women were treated like children, so in 1842, when children under ten were prohibited from working in the pits, so were women.

Coalmining Women (1982), on the other hand, shows women working in the mines—but in 1980s America in a powerful act of resistance to stereotypical gender roles and expectations. Women returned to the pits in the 1970s (at least in the United States) when laws changed, mechanized tools took the place of pick-axes, and economic conditions led them to seek employment in the mines. Coalmining Women illustrates some of the problems women face in the mines—and from their male co-workers. The forty-minute documentary also includes footage of interviews with the first women miners to take their protest power to Washington, D.C., especially in a fight for black-lung benefits. From 1978, when women gained (legal) equity in the workplace, women from Colorado to Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky entered the mines to earn better pay for equal work alongside men in spite of their need to resist gender roles and stereotypes.

Although Coalmining Women demonstrates the extent of women’s resistance both in the mine and on the picket line in the late twentieth century. “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” reminds us that women working in “nontraditional” jobs and donning “nontraditional” roles are nothing new. Women worked in mines beside men as soon as mining became a profession. They continued to work at collieries after their work in the pits was outlawed. And their return to the mines in the last few decades rests on a foundation of women, who continually revise images of “women’s work.” Such a revision serves as one of the most powerful forms of resistance there is.