ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the gap in the literature by reporting on a study of Appalachian women miners in the latter part of the twentieth century. These women, whose stories are reflected in other studies of women engaged in non-traditional employment in other male dominated class centric rural extractive industries in the West, represented an early challenge to capitalist patriarchy in the emerging post-colonialism of the Appalachian region. The restructuring of the Appalachian economy presents new opportunities and challenges for feminist and class based inquiry. Women who became involved in the Appalachian mining industry confronted a workplace in which a particular form of classed masculinity was predominant and around which they had to negotiate. Both the Australian and Appalachian women experienced the sexualization of work relations and the workplace, a sexual division of labour related to mechanized skills, and were generally denied on the job training; all for the sake of keeping hegemonic masculinity intact.
