Victorians Shocked by Women Miners in Pants
August 25, 2018 1:00 PM   Subscribe

And down in the mines themselves there was nudity! Quite apart from the children who labored in dangerous conditions, men and women worked side-by-side, stripped to the waist and sweating furiously in the heat. There was “something truly hideous and Satanic about it,” Scriven said—not least because some of the women, if they weren’t completely naked, were wearing trousers.
posted by MovableBookLady (20 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I so very often feel the desire to punch history in the face.
posted by lydhre at 1:06 PM on August 25, 2018 [28 favorites]


A highly relevant song methinks...The Testimony of Patience Kershaw by The Unthanks
posted by AllTheEights at 1:09 PM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


So they were contributing to the delinquency of miners?
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:11 PM on August 25, 2018 [68 favorites]


I wonder if any of them were named Beryl, Stella, or Margaret.

It's impossible to distinguish the complaints based on unfair labor practices against the female workers from the complaints based on misogyny. The do-gooders could only do so much good at once in the Victorian era.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:15 PM on August 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


So they were contributing to the delinquency of miners?

boooooo I love it
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:23 PM on August 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


Mining is a hellish, unforgiving and terrible job. Those women were badasses and fuck those idiots for getting the vapors over pants. Paid half of what men were.
posted by amanda at 1:28 PM on August 25, 2018 [13 favorites]


Zola researched his novel Germinal carefully, and it describes women down a mine pushing coal carts in breeches, bent double, sometimes down on all fours. The novel's most poignant parts are about one of these young women and a young man who boards in her family's home and works with her, sleeping in separate beds in the same room, surrounded by young children who sleep in the same room, changing facing away from each other, maintaining propriety, falling in love. The Victorians were on the right page, but reading all wrong.

I can't recommend the book highly enough. It is like a realistic description of everyday life in Mordor, with the mine itself as Sauron. It's about how you go on strike against Sauron.
posted by ckridge at 1:30 PM on August 25, 2018 [23 favorites]


“The chain passing high up between the legs of two girls, had worn large holes in their trousers. Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work. No brothel can beat it.”

Apparently upper-class Victorian dudes were turned on by literally anything. Perhaps everything.
posted by GuyZero at 2:32 PM on August 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


Yep...some of the most brutal, dangerous, dehumanizing working conditions since the silver mines of Peru, and you're concerned about women in fucking trousers*. Well fucking done, Victorian capitalists. *slow clap*


*note: "women in fucking trousers" should not be confused with "women in fucking-trousers," which was something that Prince Bertie was into.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:49 PM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I will offer a brief requiem for the mine ponies who lived most of their lives toiling in the dark. Sun and pasture was far, far away.
posted by SPrintF at 2:59 PM on August 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Seconding Germinal. I was just thinking of how much happens in that novel and how much background explanation comes in. I've never read a gripping translation (I'm not sure I've ever read a post-nineteenth-c translation) but great novels anyway.
posted by clew at 3:10 PM on August 25, 2018


This reminds me of World War I, where British generals denied body armor for soldiers and parachutes for airmen. They claimed that armor was for cowards, and believed that any flyer with a parachute would bail out before engaging in a dog fight. Culture is decorum.
posted by Brian B. at 3:52 PM on August 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I keep going between an idealistic vision of men and women stripped to the waist and maybe working as equals and the realistic vision that probably the women also got a bunch of shitty harassment from the workers as well as the Victorian mine owners.
posted by corb at 4:25 PM on August 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


This reminds me of World War I, where British generals … claimed that armor was for cowards, and believed that any flyer with a parachute would bail out before engaging in a dog fight.

Well, it shouldn't. Probably they were wrong about armour, and perhaps it was because they were big into that Dulce et Decorum Est bullshit, but more likely it was because they were careless dimwits. And parachutes were cutting edge technology. Maybe they could've been closer to where the Germans were on that front, but, they weren't. And like I said before, they were arrogant dimwits.

But mainly, it's because this report was about 75 years before WWI, so from a completely different time.

Culture is decorum.

Nah, it was much more about completely failing to come to terms with how poor conditions were in the mines. You can see it in coverage of poverty nowadays, across the media, whether at home in the UK or US. Deprivation is treated as lack of decorum rather than something caused by the contempt of the more fortunate.

But to be clear, the article misleads. The ‘hideous and Satanic’ quote from Scrivens's Commission (digitised here) is in the sentence
“The scene he found in the cramped, dimly lit, workplace had, he said, 'something truly hideous and Satanic about it', arising from the heat, the contorted postures of the miners and the 'offensive odour from their excessive perspiration'.
in the book Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. It's not really shown that his disgust for the working conditions came from prurience.

Also irritating me is that the quotes are talking about 1840s North Staffordshire, but all the pictures in the article are from 1900s Lancashire. My godfather's dad left school and got a job mining in South Staffordshire about the same amount of time later, in the early 1960s. A lot happens in 60 years.
posted by ambrosen at 6:01 PM on August 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


... women were paid roughly half of what men were, allowing their employer, the collier, to spend “one shilling to one shilling sixpence more at the alehouse.”

Pit girls seem to have enjoyed being photographed, for which they were sometimes paid a shilling.


Ya think?!?? Those little sluts in their pants want to earn a shilling holding still for ten minutes rather then digging for ten hours. Go figure.

...fuck those idiots for getting the vapors over pants. Paid half of what men were.

Seconding Amanda.
There are times I'm worried that the next misogynist that opens his mouth in front of me is going to get a love tap with a 2x4. I don't believe violence provides any kind of an answer, but it would be damn satisfying momentarily.
posted by BlueHorse at 10:33 PM on August 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I will offer a brief requiem for the mine ponies who lived most of their lives toiling in the dark. Sun and pasture was far, far away.

Agreed. Many of them had a horrible life, but the lucky ones were hauled up for a day in the sun occasionally. The 1911 Coal Mine Act, aka 'The Pit Pony's Charter' did alleviate many of the worst conditions for the ponies. A trained and reliable pony was a fairly valuable asset, and while conditions weren't any better than the workers were subject to, the company didn't want to see the ponies subjected to the type of mistreatment that would devalue them, and they were routinely cared for. Many of the pony boys in the pit loved their pony partner and relied on them for comfort. When you're seven years old in the dark and cold, and you can put your hands under a pony's warm mane, that tends to build a pretty strong bond.

However, the women in their disgusting pants were a dime a dozen, and the company would always be able to find someone hungry for a job. Ill or injured? You're disposable.
posted by BlueHorse at 10:52 PM on August 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


I was taught about this in (home) school by my mum, a qualified teacher and miners daughter. Labour laws, lord Shackleton, reforms, child labour etc. I haven't the bandwidth right now to read the article but I have read extracts from primary sources, some of the workers testimony abd mine owners 'defences'.
So for the reformers, yes there is horror that the work forced women into a perceived loss of femininity that also could be very indecent according to the mores of the time. But they were the mores of the time so everyone had them and I bet those women didn't think it was a good thing in the 1840s to work half naked with their bits hanging out of their trousers, or develop bald patches pushing heavey wagons with their heads. The reforms got children in particular and women out of dreadful working conditions and led to improvements for all miners.

Got a bunch of shitty harassment from the workers
That 'loss of femininity' included the reformers finding some of the women workers pretty intimidating in a shouting swearing and fighting way, they did not put up with crap. Women stayed working at the pit head well into the 20th century where some tasks were assigned to women only teams, for instance moving big wooden beams about - I remember this detail but not what the beams were for. I suspect a lot of the photos of pit lasses in their thick leather trousers and boots are of these teams in the early half of the 20th. Century.

These women were extremely well respected and people approached them with care. In a documentary about South Shields one guy talked about being sent with a message to the pit head as a young man. 'and you had to watch how you spoke to them because if they didn't like you they'd have your trousers off.'

Well he said it in dialect but that was the gist. Popular songs of that time and place are full of references to The Bonny Pit Lassie. My father, a foreigner, could hardly belive it in the late forties when he saw miners come home on a Friday from the pit and before they come into the house, put their pay into the wife's apron as she sat by the door.
posted by glasseyes at 5:25 AM on August 26, 2018 [8 favorites]


She was also quite aerated that Wilberforce of abolitionist fame was a mine owner not much noted for concern about working conditions in his own mines. I've never before thought of finding out more about this actually, that is, it's been a received opinion from my education. I suppose the point is, not to set up a Which-is-worse competition between chattel slavery and other institutions of economic exploitation/ human rights abuse, but to take on board that a person's ethical action in one field doesn't preclude their vicious self interest in another.
posted by glasseyes at 5:46 AM on August 26, 2018


To extract an actual point from my first comment, working conditions needed to be improved, 'patrician reformers' aren't the only people allowed to have sensitivities about decorum - maybe working women and men also had sensitivities that were being trampled by unbridled capitalism? And lastly, mining communities in uk had a reputation as tough, strong, canny, people, men and women.
posted by glasseyes at 5:59 AM on August 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


So close to being right.

Also mining will be the death of our species. When we figured out we could pull irreplaceable elements out of our planet and exploit them we were doomed.

We got Ella Fitzgerald and my fiancee so I guess we had a good run.
posted by East14thTaco at 8:01 AM on August 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


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