Voices in the Coalshed – International Women’s Day 2025

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is Accelerate Action. The day’s intention is to honour women and their achievements as well as raising awareness about gender equality and empowerment of women.

This set me thinking about the women whose lives were, and still are, linked with mining.

Historically, we know, women and girls worked underground alongside their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, moving the coal hewn by them toward the surface. Badly paid, they suffered in the harsh conditions. After 1842, they moved to surface work as Pit Brow Lasses.

But it is the more modern women I have been thinking about. Women like my grandmother and great-grandmothers, whose financial security was dependent on the mining industry. These women kept their families fed and clothed through thrift and hard work. They were skilled at making and mending. They darned and knitted and sewed for their families. They were recyclers, making rag rugs and unravelling jumpers to knit the wool again.

When their men came home from work in their muck, it was these women who carried and boiled the water for their baths and scrubbed their backs.

These women.

The lives of women in mining families changed significantly with the development of Pithead Baths, which saved time as they no longer had to heat water and clean clothes in front of the fire. They supported their men and their communities through difficult times, through strikes when money was scarce and through redundancy when pits were closed.

They supported their friends and their communities when their world fell apart. They marched, they raised funds, they gave help and support to those around them and they never gave in.

These women who waited for news at the pit top when accidents happened. These women who cared for their injured fathers and husbands and sons and who, in the worst of times carried on without them.

So, for this International Women’s Day I am not asking you to think about the famous women with links to the coal industry; I am asking you to celebrate the women around you. The women you know, or knew, and loved. The Florences and the Hazels and the Kittys and the Lilians and the Annies and the Bettys; your Nanas and Mums and wives and daughters and sisters and granddaughters and friends. All of the women who made the mining communities across the country.

All of them.

Written by Volunteer Nicola