Daughters of the Mountain
Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pennsylvania State University Press
Published:3rd Oct '06
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields.
Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.
“This new book contains a wealth of information about work experiences and work relations of several women who entered coal mining as an occupation.”
—Goldenseal
“Her writing is elegant and compassionate. . . . Tallichet’s study will be a valuable addition to the literature exploring the nature of our socially constructed world, the ways in which we are assigned our place and the small acts of resistance, which cause the ‘normal’ to be adjusted to the complexity of human life.”
—Frank Bonner Work, Employment and Society
“The book is very well written, and Tallichet is careful to substantiate her claims with the rich data she collected over fifteen years. She treats her subjects with respect and recognizes the tensions, contradictions and fault lines in their collective accounts of working in the mines. This is the work of a seasoned social researcher.”
—Mary Margaret Fonow Contemporary Sociology
“The well-written and interesting stories provide a picture of women who have struggled to succeed in a very patriarchal workplace.”
—A.A. Hickey Choice
ISBN: 9780271029030
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 19mm
Weight: 513g
216 pages