Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia

Preface

P R E F A C E Sometimes it is life’s tragedies and the sorrow they bring that ultimately provide the personal spark for scholarly investigations, such as the one represented in this book. Ironically, where one woman’s life ended, an important part of mine began. The story behind this study of women miners in southern West Virginia started in State College, Pennsylvania, on the morning of October 6, 1979, when I picked up a folded edition of the local paper from the foyer floor. The front-page headline of the Centre Daily Times read: ‘‘Miner Dives to Safety, But . . . Tragic Scene Etched in His Mind.’’ Being a graduate student in journalism back then, I began reading this article to see how it was written. But the more I read, the more I was drawn into the story itself. A few days earlier there had been an accident at the Rushton Mine in Osceola Mills, Pennsylvania , only about an hour’s drive west from our campus community. Far removed from the relatively insular environment of a university town, news of this tragic accident had come spilling out of a dark and dangerous world much like the thirty-foot layer of rock that had descended upon a miner running a roof bolter and his helper, a woman miner named Marilyn McCusker. He escaped certain death; she did not. McCusker had become wedged underneath the slab and had suffocated to death. Horrific as this was, I was just as struck by her co-worker’s explanation of events. He said that women didn’t belong in the mines because they did not react as quickly as men. Nonetheless, he concluded with the haunting and contradictory comment that ‘‘she seemed to hesitate when that rock started coming. Maybe she waited to see if I made it.’’ As much as McCusker’s death had nagged me since that crisp fall morning, it had also fueled my fascination with women in mining. During the years that followed, I read numerous magazine and newspaper viii preface articles about women miners, laying the foundation for my doctoral dissertation in rural sociology at Penn State. I knew that women miners were having trouble advancing to more skilled jobs, but I needed to find empirical support for this. So I began with a Bureau of Mines data set based on a random survey of men and women miners nationwide. It included all the variables necessary for establishing job-level sex segregation among underground coal miners and for assessing the effects of gender and human capital factors (age, training, and job experience) on miners’ job rank. I found that women were concentrated in the lower job ranks, relative to men, but also that gender was a more powerful predictor of a miner’s job rank than all the human capital factors combined . However, confining my inquiry to the use of a variable did not tell me how gender was adversely affecting women’s advancement. Statistics in no way revealed women miners’ lived experiences. I needed to use qualitative techniques, but actually going into the field to interview women miners was a whole other prospect. No one in my family had ever been a coal miner. I did not even know any coal miners. So I began poring over books about mining technology, labor history, and anything else written about women coal miners. I learned from my reading of the Coal Employment Project (cep), a women miners’ advocacy group. Before going into the field I attended two of their annual conferences and spent hours talking to women miners from across the country, among them Cosby Totten and Bernice Dombrowski. Cosby, a former miner and cep director, always made me feel included at the women’s conferences. And Bernice, who had worked with Marilyn McCusker at the Rushton mine, gave me some pointers about asking questions. Next I needed to locate a cohort of women miners , but where? At the next cep conference I talked with former coal miner Marat Moore, who was now a journalist and photographer for the United Mine Workers’ Journal. She suggested several large coal mines for potential study. But how could I get permission to do the interviews, examine employment records, or go on underground tours of the mines? Back on the Penn State campus, mining engineering professor Stanley Suboleski helped me get a coal company’s permission to do all these things if I promised to preserve the anonymity of my sources...