Women in Welsh Coal Mining

Women in Welsh Coal Mining PDF Author: Norena Shopland
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 139907525X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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 appalled, and harshly criticized women (but not men) for working in such environments and so close to male workers. Find a respectable job, like domestic service, they were told - despite the fact that few jobs for women were available in such industrialized areas. Like the more famous Pit Brow Lasses of Lancashire, the Tip Girls were castigated for having ‘unsexed’ themselves, accused of immorality, of being unfit wives and mothers and society went on a mission to save them. But the Tip Girls did not want to be saved. For nearly a hundred years, these women fought society and Parliament to keep their jobs and clear their reputations. Norena Shopland tells their story for the first time. New research from census returns and newspaper accounts have uncovered over 1,500 named women who worked in the Welsh coalfields – only a few could be included in this book - but it shows how much more work is needed in order for us to continue to celebrate these remarkable women.

Women in Welsh Coal Mining

Women in Welsh Coal Mining PDF Author: Norena Shopland
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 139907525X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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 appalled, and harshly criticized women (but not men) for working in such environments and so close to male workers. Find a respectable job, like domestic service, they were told - despite the fact that few jobs for women were available in such industrialized areas. Like the more famous Pit Brow Lasses of Lancashire, the Tip Girls were castigated for having ‘unsexed’ themselves, accused of immorality, of being unfit wives and mothers and society went on a mission to save them. But the Tip Girls did not want to be saved. For nearly a hundred years, these women fought society and Parliament to keep their jobs and clear their reputations. Norena Shopland tells their story for the first time. New research from census returns and newspaper accounts have uncovered over 1,500 named women who worked in the Welsh coalfields – only a few could be included in this book - but it shows how much more work is needed in order for us to continue to celebrate these remarkable women.

Our Mothers' Land

Our Mothers' Land PDF Author: Angela V John
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783162872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of this groundbreaking book. It reflects the pioneering research of its contributors to the development of modern Welsh women’s history. The eight chapters range widely across time (1830-1939) and place, from exploring working class women’s community sanctions and the perils facing collier’s wife to the very different lifestyles of ironmasters’ wives. They also tackle the idealised images of respectable Welsh women in periodicals and the tragic reality of those who took their own lives as well as showing us the transgressive actions of suffrage rebels. They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women’s employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War. This volume makes available once more a book that has become a classic in its field and a vital part of the historiography of modern Wales. This expanded edition also brings us up to date. It reveals the research and publications of the last two decades and comments upon the extent to which Wales has moved beyond being the familiar ‘land of our fathers’. Written in a lively and accessible style, it nevertheless draws upon a wealth of research and expertise and should appeal to both the academic community and to a much wider readership.

By the Sweat of Their Brow

By the Sweat of Their Brow PDF Author: Angela V. John
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 9780415380096
Category : Coal mines and mining
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Coal in Victorian Britain, Part II, Volume 6

Coal in Victorian Britain, Part II, Volume 6 PDF Author: John Benson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040249302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Coal is a topic that has been, remains, and will continue to be of significant interest to those concerned with the causes, course and consequences of industrialization and de-industrialization. This six-volume, reset collection provides scholars with a wide variety of sources relating to the Victorian coal industry.

After Coal

After Coal PDF Author: Tom Hansell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do communities and cultures survive? Central Appalachia and south Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal's decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labor unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy. It tells the story of four decades of exchange between two mining communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and profiles individuals and organizations that are undertaking the critical work of regeneration. The stories in this book are told through interviews and photographs collected during the making of After Coal, a documentary film produced by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University and directed by Tom Hansell. Considering resonances between Appalachia and Wales in the realms of labor, environment, and movements for social justice, the book approaches the transition from coal as an opportunity for marginalized people around the world to work toward safer and more egalitarian futures.

How Green Was My Valley

How Green Was My Valley PDF Author: Richard Llewellyn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439164932
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
"How Green Was My Valley" is Richard Llewellyn's bestselling -- and timeless -- classic and the basis of a beloved film. As Huw Morgan is about to leave home forever, he reminisces about the golden days of his youth when South Wales still prospered, when coal dust had not yet blackened the valley. Drawn simply and lovingly, with a crisp Welsh humor, Llewellyn's characters fight, love, laugh and cry, creating an indelible portrait of a people.

Women, Work, and Protest

Women, Work, and Protest PDF Author: Ruth Milkman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136247688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
As paid work becomes increasingly central in women’s lives, the history of their labor struggles assumes more and more importance. This volume represents the best of the new feminist scholarship in twentieth-century U.S. women’s labor history. Fourteen original essays illuminate the complex relationship between gender, consciousness and working-class activism, and deepen historical understanding of the contradictory legacy of trade unionism for women workers. The contributors take up a wide range of specific subjects, and write from diverse theoretical perspectives. Some of the essays are case studies of women’s participation in individual unions, organizing efforts, or strikes; others examine broader themes in women’s labor history, focusing on a specific time period; and still others explore the situation of particular categories of women workers over a longer time span. This collection extends the scope of current research and interpretation in women’s labor history, both conceptually and in terms of periodization – emphasis is placed on the post-World War I period where the literature is sparse. This book will be valuable for scholars, students and general readers alike.

Pit Lasses

Pit Lasses PDF Author: Denise Bates
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399078046
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Women have long been recognized as the backbone of coalmining communities, supporting their men. Less well known is the role which they played as the industry developed, working underground alongside their husband or father, moving the coal which he had cut. The year 2012 is significant as it is the 170th anniversary of the publication of the Report of the Commission into the Employment of Children and Young People in Coal Mines (May 1842). The report findings included the revelation that in some mines half-dressed women worked alongside naked men. The resulting outrage led to the banning of females working underground three months later. The Report of the Commission has been neglected as a source for many decades with the same few quotations regularly being used to illustrate the same headline points. And yet about 500 women and girls gave statements about what mining was like in 1841 and in earlier years in different parts of the country. In conjunction with the 1841 census it paints a comprehensive, though previously unexplored picture of the work of a female miner, how she lived when not at work, how she was regarded by the wider community and what she could achieve. Although banned from working underground, women were still allowed to work above ground after 1842. In the second half of the nineteenth century around 3,000 women continued to be employed at the pit head though this was increasingly confined to the pit brow lasses of Lancashire. This book examines the life of the female miner in the nineteenth century through to the outbreak of the Great War, both at work and away from it, drawing out the largely untapped evidence within contemporary sources - and challenging received wisdoms.

Welsh Americans

Welsh Americans PDF Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807832200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This title discusses Welsh miners, American coal, and the construction of ethnic identity. In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the United States. The majority of them were skilled labourers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies.

The Welsh in Iowa

The Welsh in Iowa PDF Author: Cherilyn A Walley
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708322417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
The Welsh in Iowa is the history of the little known Welsh immigrant communities in the American Midwestern state of Iowa. Dr. Walley’s book identifies what made the Welsh unique as immigrants to North America, and as migrants and settlers in a land built on such groups. With research rooted in documentary evidence and supplemented with community and oral histories, The Welsh in Iowa preserves and examines Welsh culture as it was expressed in middle America by the farmers and coal miners who settled or passed through the prairie state as it grew to maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work seeks to not only document the Welsh immigrants who lived in Iowa, but to study the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group in a state known for its ethnic heritage.