Women's Participation in the Brookside Coal Strike: Militance, Class, and Gender in Appalachia

Abstract

The decade spanning the late 1960's through the late 1970's was a period of broad-based and militant social protest in the Appalachian South. In West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina thousands of people mobilized both in rural communities and in the urban centers of the region. -There were violent labor disputes in coal mines, textile mills, hospitals, public schools, discount retail stores, nuclear plants, and in the city services sector. -Safety and health issues were fought over in these and many other work places. -Environmental protection and public health issues were debated in local county court houses, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress while people tried to get some control over serious threats ranging from strip mining to drinking water. -Lack of equity in access to simple community services was protested by welfare rights groups and various coalitions of community-based social justice groups. -Ownership and control of regional resources was challenged by a wide range of local and regional groups, as was the use and misuse of state and federal funds targeted to address the region's persistent poverty. It was a decade when the nation heard many voices from Appalachia-voices that challenged traditional stereotypes and spotlighted an area of the country where articulate and angry people were organizing for basic social and economic change. During this period I was working for a regional newsmagazine based in the central Appalachian coalfields. Because of my work, I was able to meet and get to know many of the people who were leaders in these local and regional movements. In every instance, I found that women were key figures in the protests. They were leaders in the political movements surrounding black lung, brown lung, welfare rights, unionization and union democracy, environmental protection, the provision of community services, use of regional resources, and work place safety and health. Frankly, I was surprised to find this high level of political activity among working-class women in that part of the country. My current research is on two labor disputes in eastern Kentucky that took place in the early 1970's in which large numbers of women were mobilized and in which women played key roles that shaped the nature and outcome of events. This paper focuses on the 1973-74 strike in Harlan County, Kentucky-a strike by coal miners over union representation. That strike resulted in the formation of the now-famous Brookside Women's Club, which is featured in the film Harlan County, U.S.A. The other strike was in Pike County, Kentucky, where over 200 nonprofessional employees of a hospital-most of whom were womenmaintained a twenty-four-hour picket line for over two years in an unsuccessful effort to win union representation. The question of such a high degree of involvement by women in these strikes underlies my research. What was it that got these women mobilized, kept them active, and led them to do things they had not only never done before but also had never dreamed of doing? The strikes were violent; they lasted a long time; they challenged entrenched and powerful elites that controlled both counties where the conflicts occurred. Still, women were at the forefront