Women Miners in Developing Countries

Pit Women and Others

Martha Macintyre, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351871938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.

PART I

Reconstructing Gendered Histories of Mines

Chapter 1

Women Miners: Here and There, Now and Then¹

Gill Burke

Introduction

This chapter looks at women miners in Asia at a general and contextual level, mainly during the modern period. It suggests that in the majority of instances women have always participated in small scale, artisanal mining and, indeed, continue to do so in many countries today. In larger scale operations however, women's participation apparently occurred only at the early stages of industrialized mining. The reasons for this and the subsequent development of the masculinist model for mine workers will be examined.

Although the main focus of the chapter is historical it attempts to find linkages with contemporary practice in developing countries. The purpose is to present material at a general level, a tour d'horizon, that sets the scene for the detailed country-specific chapters that follow. I acknowledge that in the process I may raise more questions than I answer. I also acknowledge – and hope to avoid – the risk of falling into the ‘universalism’ rightly criticized by Chakrabarty (1989) with, indeed, the added risk of being accused of ‘Orientalism’ when testing whether Asian experience fits western constructs. In addition, as an Australian, I may be accused of ‘cultural cringe’ for giving so many European examples – what a risky business it all is. I could justify it but prefer simply to press on.

Women were and are involved in mining in three different ways. They can be miners – actually involved in the extractive process either below ground in large mines or in small scale artisanal mines. Or they can be workers at surface – involved in the sorting, crushing or preparation of coal or ore. Nowadays there are other women working at surface as well, as clerks, secretaries, nurses, but I am excluding them from this examination. Being a secretary in a mining company is not much different to being a secretary in any other company. The third involvement for women is as members of the mining community – responsible for the reproduction of the workforce on a day-to-day as well as a generational basis. This will be touched on but not to any great extent.

Let's begin by setting the context for these women workers. It is crucial to emphasize that it is as miners that they are being examined. Thus mining provides the perspective, framework and parameters for any analysis. To have it otherwise is simply to reprise old debates by writers of women's history; to have yet another anthropological take on yet another area where women are (probably/usually) disadvantaged or to devolve into yet another study of women in development. In addition, mining as the contextual framework allows for comparisons over time and place in what otherwise is a very, very heterogeneous field. As Rounaq Jahan (1982) has warned:

Any generalization about Asian women is hazardous. Asia is a continent of immense diversity and vast contrasts. Asia shows women in powerful positions … yet millions of the world's most oppressed women live in Asia. In major Asian cities one finds thousands of well educated and well trained professional women but the vast countryside is full of millions of illiterate, poor women working long hours to find and carry water, firewood and food for the family. Class cleavages and rural-urban differences result in wide disparity in life styles and opportunity structures for different groups of Asian women. Any report on Asia has to take cognizance of such differences.

Whilst it's true that women miners are indeed ‘hidden from history’, any attempt at ‘recovery’ needs contextualizing within the problematics of mining history. This is especially the case with Asian women miners. International comparisons and linkages can help especially because of the lack of visibility, both in public perception and most scholarly work, of women miners in Asia and, indeed, almost everywhere else. In particular, the low profile of women miners takes on a special quality due to the contrasting high public profile of male miners.

Mining is an ancient, global industry. Metal mining and its concomitant metallurgy was highly developed many thousands of years before the Christian era. Mining tin and copper, then smelting them to make bronze, afforded artifacts of a high order. Notable early examples are the bracelets and spearheads found at Ban Chiang in Northern Thailand and the large incense burners of cast bronze of Shang period China which all date from around 3000BCE (Raymond, 1984)². Coal mining also has a long history but remained highly localized around areas where outcrops were easily accessible. Transport costs precluded wider use of bulky coal especially where alternative fuel sources were easily available. Precious and base metals had few substitutes, and far higher use-value. Thus metal mining, smelting and manufacture was far more widely spread³. This remained true in both Asia and Europe from pre-modern times.

From early times it seems that miners were perceived as ‘other’ – as a group apart, independent and lawless. In pre-industrial societies as disparate as Ming China and feudal Europe special laws emphasized this separateness. The coming of industrialization did not fundamentally alter this perception; indeed, if anything, it heightened it. By modern times the miner as ‘other’ had become characterized by two, not necessarily exclusive, forms of behaviour – the one, reckless and given to drinking, gambling, fighting and so forth; the other as highly politicized proletarian in the forefront of industrial action. Metcalfe (1988), in his study of the New South Wales coalfields, terms the ideal types of these two forms the ‘Larrikin’ and the ‘Respectable’ mode of class struggle. Although it is possible to suggest – and I will give some examples, that women mineworkers often showed similar independence traits it is the male miner who provides the dominant image. Thus the Ying of invisible women is overshadowed by the Yang of only too visible men. Gender therefore is central to the business of unpacking miners’ history.

How these images of the male miner developed will be discussed after first examining women miners since, I suggest, the one is indissolubly linked to the other. If indeed Metcalfe is correct in posing ideal types, these proletarian workers in an industrial context that he describes have come a very long way from the shared family enterprise that characterized earliest mining and still typifies much small-scale mining today.

Women as miners

The organization of the mining process has, inevitably, a strong geological determinism. The early period of mineral development, at different points of time in different countries, begins with outcrops or with ‘streaming’ – extraction of alluvial minerals from rivers. Then, unless the deposits continue as alluvial, mining goes underground, by various means, from there. With some exceptions it is not until the modern period that geological prospecting leads to shaft-sinking, open-cuts or dredge-pond building as the first step. Thus early mines were generally small.

They were/are also, generally, family-worked operations⁴. It is in this context that most women become miners. In many instances the family work unit divides its time between mining and agriculture, with mining as a ‘cash-crop’ alongside food production. Lest this rural idyll seduces, let us not forget that even in this context mining (and quarrying⁵) is hard and dirty physical labour for all concerned. In addition, the family may not be free labour, gaining full benefit from their output, but instead be contractors, or corvée labourers or in debt bondage to others who own the mineral deposits.

Examining mining in Pre-conquest South America, Taussig (1980) describes a small-scale activity run by the Incas as a monopoly, with labour provided by a rotating corvée that was not particularly burdensome to the miners. It was a minor economic activity because the Incas valued silver and gold only as a form of ornamentation and not as a form of wealth:

One of Pisarro's secretaries describes mines of 60 to 240 feet deep which were worked by a few score miners, both men and women… the miners worked only four months of the year … having to return to their villages to resume their agricultural responsibilities… Writing in 1588, Acosta stated that the Inca entertained the miners with all they needed for their expenses and that mining ‘was no servitude to them but rather a pleasing life’.

It would be misleading, I think, to simply term this form of mining ‘pre-industrial’ since in many countries other more complex forms of mine and mining organization developed alongside these even in the pre-modern period. And, indeed, small mines exist alongside large, complex ones today. What is true however is that industrialization of mining operations changes the nature of women's work and ultimately forces them out of directly being miners.

Inca gold mining apart, I have so far found only one past example of women working as underground miners of precious or base metals. This was in the gold mines of Mysore, India, during the 19^th century. The presence there of family work groups underground was commented on by the Inspector of Mines who was relieved to see that in most mines this practice was being phased out (BSP, 1894). Elsewhere, there are women gold miners aplenty in small scale mines, but as these mines deepen the women stay at surface. Quite why this is so is not clear, reasons of geology, of required skills, of belief and superstition come to mind⁶. Even today, in many countries with highly developed and mechanized metalliferous mining industries, there is a reluctance to allow women underground even as visitors let alone as workers⁷. It is coal mining that provides the many examples of women underground miners.

Unlike metalliferous mining, coal mining requires muscle rather than much skill⁸. In unmechanized mines almost anyone can be a collier. Indeed, Harrison (1978) has suggested this is a significant causal factor in the development of western coal miners’ industrial militancy. The toughest muscle is needed at the actual coalface to hew coal from rock. This seems to have always been done by men and the ‘Big Hewer’ rapidly became the heroic face of mining in many countries. Even when women worked alongside it was in an inferior position, gathering the hewn coal, loading it into containers and tramming or carrying it to surface.

This distinction can be clearly seen in a drawing of a man and woman at the Chikuhō district coal mines, Japan⁹ (Figure 1.1).

The gallery they are working in is too low to stand. H...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Women Miners in Developing Countries
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Where Life is in the Pits (and Elsewhere) and Gendered
• PART I Reconstructing Gendered Histories of Mines
• PART II Gender and Ethnic Identities in the Mines
• PART III Gender in the Mining Economies
• PART IV Global Processes, Local Resistances
• Index