Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1995

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

History

Major Professor

John Bohstedt

Abstract

At the time of the Coal Mines Act of 1842, which excluded women from underground work in Britain's coalmines, it was noted by the Commissioners reporting to Parliament that women were not universally employed in underground work in Britain's coalmines. They were employed only in some of the mines of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, South Wales, Cheshire, and the east of Scotland, and appear to have left underground work 30 to 60 years earlier in other mining regions. How can we account for the fact that women were still working underground in these limited areas, when they already had left the mines elsewhere? Despite widespread scholarly interest in Britain's mining industry and the people who worked in it, there has been no systematic effort to address this question. In his exhaustive study of the colliers of the early nineteenth century, P. E. H. Hair spent a total of five pages out of 460 discussing the reasons for women's underground employment, saying little work was available for them elsewhere. Angela John draws the same conclusion in a brief paragraph discussion of the issue. as does Ivy Pinchbeck in a slightly longer paragraph. The predominant topic of scholarly debate related to the Mines Act of 1842 has focused, not on the reasons why women might have been working underground, but instead on the manner in which the Mines Act functioned as an instrument of exclusion. The notion of exclusion implies that issues of power and subordination were involved in women leaving the mines of England after 1842; but should we then infer that those same issues were factors in inducing women to leave underground work elsewhere during the previous century? The fact that women were still working in some regions of Great Britain while they largely had left the mines in other areas indicates that different decisions about their lives and work were being made in those different regions, but by whom and for what reasons? Could it be that women in both cases decided for themselves, for reasons that they deemed best, whether or not to work underground? In order to account for such different patterns of employment, this thesis focuses on two separate regions at the times during which each was undergoing rapid expansion of its coalmining industries: the Tyne and Wear region of the northeastern coalfield during the late 1700's, an area where women had left underground work by the 1780's, and the West Riding during the early 1800's, where women continued to work underground until banned from that work in 1842. Women had left the mines of the Tyne and Wear as early as the 1780's; this thesis argues that, rather than being excluded from underground work, they may well have chosen to leave the northeastern mines of their own volition, since doing so allowed them to stay at home and better meet the special and heavy demands of caring for a family employed in the coalmines. It appears that they were able to make such a decision due to several factors: the colliers of the Tyne and Wear made a good living wage and worked under the security of a year-long contract; they had been able successfully to combine for higher wages and better job benefits. Additionally, the type of coal being mined in the Tyne and Wear, coupled with the region's superior ventilation techniques,. resulted in healthier miners who were able to work productively for a number of years. The miners of the Tyne and Wear, then, were well able to support their families without the supplementary wages of their wives and daughters. In contrast, the evidence reveals that women still working in the mines of Yorkshire in 1842 were so desperate for employment that nothing short of state intervention in the form of protective legislation (in this case, the Mines Act of 1842) could have induced these women to leave the mines. Their fathers and husbands earned relatively poor wages and worked in mines with inferior mining technologies; they appear often to have suffered from such poor health that they did not have the number of productive work years that northeastern miners enjoyed. Moreover, the Yorkshire colliers relatively low wages and meager benefits were often not enough to support a family without the assistance of their older daughters or their wives. Pressed though they were to supplement the pitmen’s inadequate wages, women were nevertheless limited in their employment options both by geographical constrictions on agriculture and technological advances in the worsted industry. In these two regions, then, we can readily see differing patterns of employment for women. In order to account for these disparate employment practices, this paper will place particular emphasis on underlying economic structures, analyzing the ways in which these structures influenced the wage-earning abilities of miners and their families. A brief overview the geographical distribution of industry and agriculture, as well as a discussion of women's roles in the working class family economy, will provide context for our analysis.

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