Women Of The Colorado Mines

Dig deeper into Colorado history through the stories of these remarkable women. Beginning with the discovery of gold near present-day Denver in 1858, Colorado’s placers and mines promised vast riches of gold, silver, and other precious minerals. That promise lured throngs of treasure seekers, including more than a few strong, savvy women. In Women of the Colorado Mines, author Linda Wommack digs deep into their tribulations and triumphs to reveal the true lives of women prospectors, mine owners, labor advocates, and a handful of mining heiresses who found fabulous wealth in them thar hills.

Beginning with the discovery of gold near present-day Denver in 1858, Colorado's placers and mines promised vast riches of gold, silver, and other precious materials. That promise lured throngs of treasure seekers, including more than a few strong, savvy women. In Women of the Colorado Mines, author Linda Wommack digs deep into their tribulations and triumphs to reveal the true lives of women prospectors, mine owners, labor advocates, and a handful of mining heiresses who found fabulous wealth in "tham thar hills."

During the gold rush, women worked alongside men panning and digging for gold and silver in the mountains of Colorado, California, and all the way up to Alaska. While many books have been written about the frontier women who ran brothels and boarding houses in mining towns, none have told the true stories of ladies who labored as hard as men out in the mines. A wonderful collection of true Americana, this book includes archival photographs of lady miners as well as the mines and boomtowns.

A true pioneer of the West, Harriet Backus writes about her amusing and often challenging experiences with heart felt emotion and vivid detail. New foreword by Pam Houston and afterword by author's grandson Rob Walton are featured.

How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability. The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.

Vividly portrays the daily lives of several women and how they battled extreme weather conditions, isolation that could drive a person mad, disease that often took their children from them, poverty and starvation, and primitive living conditions. All the stories are fictional, but all are based on women's actual experiences. The West could not have progressed and prospered without the strength, courage, and determination of such women.

Depicts the history of more than one hundred Colorado towns abandoned after the end of the mining boom

Women in the Mines informs, provokes and inspires from first page to last with gripping stories from coalfield women from 1914 to 1994. Early women miners describe handloading coal to help their families survive. The 1970s generation talks openly about sexual harassment, community attitudes, pregnancy, health and safety, racism, aging, and unemployment. The stories demonstrate the strength and resilience of women who accepted the challenge of nontraditional work and the changes in their lives brought by that decision.

Though mining is an infamously masculine industry, women make up 20 percent of all production crews in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the United States. How do these women fit into a working culture supposedly hostile to females? This is what anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, herself a onetime mine worker and the daughter of a miner, set out to discover. Her answers, based on years of participant-observation in four mines and extensive interviews with miners, managers, engineers, and the families of mine employees, offer a rich and surprising view of the working “families” that miners construct. In this picture, gender roles are not nearly as straightforward—or as straitened—as stereotypes suggest. Gender is far from the primary concern of coworkers in crews. Far more important, Rolston finds, is protecting the safety of the entire crew and finding a way to treat each other well despite the stresses of their jobs. These miners share the burden of rotating shift work—continually switching between twelve-hour day and night shifts—which deprives them of the daily rhythms of a typical home, from morning breakfasts to bedtime stories. Rolston identifies the mine workers’ response to these shared challenges as a new sort of constructed kinship that both challenges and reproduces gender roles in their everyday working and family lives. Crews’ expectations for coworkers to treat one another like family and to adopt an “agricultural” work ethic tend to minimize gender differences. And yet, these differences remain tenacious in the equation of masculinity with technical expertise, and of femininity with household responsibilities. For Rolston, such lingering areas of inequality highlight the importance of structural constraints that flout a common impulse among men and women to neutralize the significance of gender, at home and in the workplace. At a time when the Appalachian region continues to dominate discussion of mining culture, this book provides a very different and unexpected view—of how miners live and work together, and of how their lives and work reconfigure ideas of gender and kinship.