WOMEN COAL MINERS, Interviewed: WV Mine Wars Museum Forum, Women's History Month

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Wed Mar 16, 2022, 10:48 PM - Edit history (1)

- Ep. 4, Season 3 of the Mine Wars Forum, WV Mine Wars Museum, March 16th, 2022. Our director Kenzie New-Walker will chat with Kipp Dawson, Libby Lindsay, Marat Moore, and Dr. Jessie Wilkerson about their careers in the coal mine industry, and their ongoing work in telling and preserving this important piece of American History. https://wvminewars.org/

We are very grateful to have these wonderful women joining us during Women's History Month!

• Jessie Wilkerson is the Robbins Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University, where she teaches modern U.S. and Appalachian history, as well as women's and gender history. Her first book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, was published in 2019. She is currently a Carnegie Fellow.

• Kipp Dawson (1945-) was an underground coal miner in Pennsylvania 1979-92, during which time she was active both in her UMWA Local 1197, and in the Coal Employment Project/Coal Mining Women’s Support Team. Currently she is a dues-paying retired member of the United Mine Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers (after being laid off from the mines, she retrained, then worked as a K-8 teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools until 2018).
She began her social justice activism and union at her Rosie the Riveter mother’s side, continued on her own from the civil rights movement through the struggles of the 1960s and since.

• Marat Moore worked for the UMWA from 1983-1994 as writer, photographer, and investigative reporter and on strike teams at A. T. Massey and Pittston, after working at U.S. Steel #20 in Thacker, WV. At the mine in 1979-80, she was a member of L.U. 1440. With the UMWA she traveled into mines throughout the U.S. and into Nova Scotia’s largest undersea mine. She was active in CEP for 20 years, and is the author of Women in the Mines: Stories of Life & Work (1996, Twayne), drawn from 70 oral histories and documentary photos of women miners across the U.S., including early women who worked, often secretly, from 1920 into the 1940s.
Moore is researching a novel on Mary Harris Jones in the decades before Mary emerged in her fiery persona as Mother Jones. She coordinated with miner Cosby Totten the transfer of CEP’s large archive to the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University in the late 1990s, and lives with her retired UMWA husband in Jonesborough, TN, site of the first CEP reunion in 2013.

• Libby Lindsay worked as an underground coal miner from 1976 to 1996, working with both her dad (briefly) and her sister. She was involved in CEP, and has been a proud UMWA member for more than 40 years. Libby lives in Chapmanville, WV and remains active in her union and other social justice fights.

[Drum]

1. I grew up in northern WV.

I so appreciate you sharing this, and I’m eager to see it.

Many thanks!

[appalachiablue]

2. These women are articulate, strong and above all survivors. From

this broad discussion of their work, research and experiences I learned much about the times, unions and the labor movement.