1 - 1860–1914: ‘Stay at home and look after your husband’

Summary

Women in coal mining communities have been largely ‘hidden from history’, appearing briefly in a single chapter in works which focus upon miners or on the economics of the coal industry. miners, on the other hand, have long drawn the attention of scholars and literary figures. Historians, particularly labour historians, have been attracted from as early as the nineteenth century by their volatile industrial relations which often ended in violence. The emergence of stable trade unions in the late nineteenth century, born of a remarkable solidarity which, in turn, grew out of the uniquely difficult conditions in which miners worked, led to a proliferation of studies of trade-union histories dealing with virtually every mining region in england, Wales and scotland. Northumberland too has its chronicler, though the story is limited to the post-World War one period. Unlike the other studies, which focus on labour relations alone, both the Derbyshire Miners: A Study in Industrial and Social History by E.W. Williams written in 1962 and, more recently, Carolyn Baylies' The History of the Yorkshire Miners 1881–1919 (1993) have tried as far as possible, in what are trade-union histories, to include women. that the miners in the 1920s became the backbone of the Labour Party was a further incentive for studies dealing with miners, as was the bruising six-month lockout in 1926.