Pit Brow Lasses

In 1842 the employment of women and children working underground in the UK was forbidden. As a result of this legislation, many families within the coal industry fell upon hard times. One result of this change in the law, was that coal mine owners started to employ females working at the surface of their mines. Thus was born the "Pit Brow Lasses" of the North West UK - particularly in the county of Lancashire. This publication attempts to bring to life those women who toiled at the pit brow (the top of the mine shafts) through articles, press clippings and photographs. These lasses or women were years ahead of their time, insisting on their right to wear what THEY wanted and to conduct their lives as THEY thought fit and decent. This publication is a celebration of their independent spirit, their determination to stand up for their rights, to do what THEY wanted to do. This was quite unique in the Victorian Age in which many of them lived.

Women have long been recognized as the backbone of coalmining communities, supporting their men. Less well known is the role which they played as the industry developed, working underground alongside their husband or father, moving the coal which he had cut. The year 2012 is significant as it is the 170th anniversary of the publication of the Report of the Commission into the Employment of Children and Young People in Coal Mines (May 1842). The report findings included the revelation that in some mines half-dressed women worked alongside naked men. The resulting outrage led to the banning of females working underground three months later. The Report of the Commission has been neglected as a source for many decades with the same few quotations regularly being used to illustrate the same headline points. And yet about 500 women and girls gave statements about what mining was like in 1841 and in earlier years in different parts of the country. In conjunction with the 1841 census it paints a comprehensive, though previously unexplored picture of the work of a female miner, how she lived when not at work, how she was regarded by the wider community and what she could achieve. Although banned from working underground, women were still allowed to work above ground after 1842. In the second half of the nineteenth century around 3,000 women continued to be employed at the pit head though this was increasingly confined to the pit brow lasses of Lancashire. This book examines the life of the female miner in the nineteenth century through to the outbreak of the Great War, both at work and away from it, drawing out the largely untapped evidence within contemporary sources - and challenging received wisdoms.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The pit brow lasses who sorted coal and performed a variety of jobs above ground at British coal mines prompted a violent debate about women’s work in the nineteenth century. Seen as the prime example of degraded womanhood, the pit brow woman was regarded as an aberration in a masculine domain, cruelly torn from her ‘natural sphere’, the home. The, attempt to restrict women’s work at the mines in the 1880s highlights the dichotomy between the fashionable ideal of womanhood and the necessity and reality of female manual labour. Although only a tiny percentage of the colliery labour force, the pit lasses aroused an interest out of all proportion to their numbers and their work became a test case for women’s outdoor manual employment. Angela John discusses the implications of this debate, showing how it encapsulates many of the ambivalences of late Victorian attitudes towards working-class female employment, and at the same time raises wider questions both about women’s work in industries seen as traditionally male enclaves, and about the ways in which women within the working community have been presented by historians.This book was first published in 1980.

This illustrated book tells the story of the female colliery surface workers, or pit brow women, of the Wigancoalfield. The numbers of women working in mines grew vastly after the expansion of the coal industry in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The practice continued until the Children's Employment Commission 1842 outlawed women working below ground, leading to many families suffering huge losses of earnings. In Lancashire, many women soon started working the colliery surface, grading the coal on conveyors or acting as general labourers. Illustrated newspapers fostered great interest in them from 1840, and Wigancoalfield employed more than any other area. In the 1840 a a hugephotographic collection studying the women was created by A.J. Munby, which forms a major source for this detailed study. The women themselves remain a fascinating and unique feature of both local and industrial history.

Between 1720 and 1920 at least 60,000 women and girls worked in the mines, quarries and clay works of Cornwall and Devon. They carried out hard, skilled and specialised work, which was a crucial part of the dressing operations. The author has carefully researched their working lives and home-life, their characteristics and the occupational hazards they encountered. How essential were they to the industry? What were their working conditions? How much did they earn? What did they do with the very little spare time and money they had? As the mines closed, where did they go and what happened to them? This is the record of a remarkable group of women, plus some individual accounts of the few whose stories have survived. In this second edition the material has been both revised and expanded. The geographical scope now extended to Dartmoor, and the Teign and Exe Valleys. There is also a more detailed coverage of the tin streams of the late 19th century.

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The story of women's liberation as told by their changing dress – in the public gaze and in private