THE DEBATE among whether women should work underground in the mines has been joined by EILEEN MURPHY of Bolton, Lancashire who has written a play about the women Challenge as she explains....
play 1 made use of Angela John's extensive research (By ine • Well or Their Brow Croon Helm) and I inter viewed 40 women who had worked on the surface between 1910 and 1956.
Women were barred from surface work in the Wigan area in 1954. Arthur Munby made a study of them between the 1850s and 1880s, there documented evidence about the attitudes of the women themselves to the work on the surface, and of some of them to the underground work they had done previously. Shocked The 1842 Act excluding women from underground work was rusncu taroun because of working class agitation won after years of struggle' as Jack Lavin claims but because the middle class was profoundly shocked at the findings of the commission sent in to investigate child labour in the pits Some of the shock was right and Jack Lavin correct to insist that there should be no romanticising of the conditions.
But a good deal of the horror was offended VicLoriall not allly separated by class, geography and our readers about surface workers at the tradition from the mining communities for whom they were legislating.
In Victorian England it was enough for a woman wear trousers, work alongside men and get dirTor ero be concennJack Lavin's assertion that 'the campaign wasn't so much about replacing women men but about eliminating the worst jobs in the pits' is so generalised as to be extremely suspect.
Coal Certainly, Lancashire men and boys were drawing' coal to the main roadways as une wower had done, until well into Of course the women continued to evade the law and work down because they needed the money (that's men work down, too, isn't it?), and there were numerous women who didn't want to return to underground work.
But Munby's research shows that there who would have preferred to work down.
With regard to surface work we have much more women's preterences.
Several ot the women i interviewed had work in the cotton mill but movea to une pil top and preferred it. Only one had not liked the work. Their unanimity is striking and certainly didn'1 incy glamorise their work justify their feelings.
Mary Zins' confidence that miners and the National Union of Mineworkers will detend is the en morkers the the principie unions' (SC no 238) largely wishful thinking.
The union led the attempts to exclude women surface work. In Wigan the men were divid. ed but the majority of areas joined with those bosses who did not employ women, to try to get the women out.
The women's support came their own unanimity, local miners (at all levels of the union hierarchy) suftragettes and suffragists and the owners who paid them low wages.
Most of the women Mary Zins down Walbeck pit in North Nottinghamshire were not in the union in 1887 and 1911 when the two most senous parliamentary attempts were made however the Wigan women became members in 1918 and would have thought that attempts to exclude them their JODS would have given way to the full protection of the union But in the local NUM minutes there is evidence that union negotiators frePee to trees to persuade owners debar women from certain jobs.
agreement between the National Coa Board and the NUM (1954) which removed women from surface jobs altogether was instigated by the union supposed to represent the women.
They were picked off by pit, redeployed in the kitchens, most made redundant.
With the number surface jobs dwindling, there was no sign of opposition from the men at this sacking of a whole seccan camber simp. Jobs I haven't spoken to a single male pit worker who has claimed that the women could not do their jobs.
But in Wigan just 25 years on, when mechanisation has made both surface and underground jobs easier, the overwhelming male attitude is 'it's not a job fit for a woman' - the old Victorian moral ludge ment kindly, paternalistic, and much difficult to fight IU1C than outright aggression.
Joe : Gormley last year said: 'We worked too hard and too long to get women and kids out of the pits to put them back there now and I bloody well won't have a woman I'm president.' Those of us who the pin-up debate Scargill are afraid that, despite their differences, Arthur and Joe will be at one over this But maybe don't let's prejudge, but don't let's glamorise : the record of the union with regard to women any more than we should glamorise the work.
That will be of no help who tempt to break back into wond pit work in this country Finally, it is not illega for women to be employed on the surface.
The exclusion of women those jobs was done at level stand, could be overruled and, as lar by a national law such as the Sex Discrimination Act If you are interested in Eileen Murphy's CalenDon nroomceo ov riceron near which can contacted ai Atherton 892910.
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Wigan pits. She disagrees with the views put foward by Jack Lavin in issue 238 of Socialist