Category: History Publisher: windfall books
ISBN-10: 0953983900
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 134
Copyright: June 2001
the only definitive history of women working in the coal industry
In 1865, Arthur Joseph Munby, a London barrister and staunch supporter of women's right to work, interviewed a 37 year old pit head worker. She had been in service, but left to go down the pit, seven years after it had been made illegal. dressed as a man, she drew waggons or corves with a belt around her body and a chain between her legs and claimed that the breeches kept the chain from hurting....
Professional Reviews
Going UndergroundWomen's vital contribution to the Scottish mining industry.
Sair, Sair Wark focuses on
women's experiences through the centuries as workers in the Scottish mining industry, and the important part they played in their families and communities in general. As the sub-title suggests this book principally concerns women in Scottish coal mining, though Lillian reminds her readers that the growth of Britain as a whole as a great industrial nation was powered by coal.
Considerable detail is given of the heavy work in dreadful conditions which was undertaken by small girls and women underground in the early mines. The horrifying heavy labour allocated to small girls and women is vividly described in contemporary words: "Women always did the lifting or heavy part of the work and neither they nor the children were treated like human beings... Females submit to work in places where no man or even lad could be got to labour. . . up to their knees in water, their posture almost double. They are below to the last hour of pregnancy." Strikes, poor housing, high days and holidays, wars and wages, unions and politics, mining disasters and illnesses peculiar to mining and other related topics are here.
Interviews with and recollections of a number of 20th-century pit-head lassies add illuminating and fascinating information. They include the memories of Barbara (100 years old in 2000), Ann (born in 1919), Grace who went to work at he Michael Colliery in 1939 and "gaffer" Jean.
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Reviews for "sair, sair wark, women and mining in scotland"
I come from a mining background myself and can assure you that men were treated like dirt, ie the lockouts of the early 1920s and the shooting of striking miners in Wales in the early 20th c. Women rarely worked below ground; they were generally employed to clean coal - separate coal from stone and slate. It is a strange quirk of social conscience that does not display the same horror at men having to do such dangerous and risky work. But then men have always been dispensible, eg sent to war etc. Coal mining killed my grandad and my dad and a not a small percentage of our village men. The Burngrange pit disaster in the 1940s left men buried underground to this day. Thousands of men have been killed down below but as I have said, men are dispensible. They come after women, children and pets. Such is the nature of our humanness.
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