(Im)Mobility in the Anthracite Fields: Friction of Distance Among Working Women at the Turn of the 20th Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Patch towns in American coalfields are infamous for their feudal practices in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which kept mine workers and their families tied to the town. The coal companies’ most well-known means of control was debt bondage, which centers men’s labor as the deciding factor in a family’s (im)mobility. In the following paper I explore the daily lives of women and children and their labor, within and outside the house, to better understand what tied these families to company towns and prevented them from seeking better living arrangements elsewhere. I find that friction of distance, land use, food access, and women’s employment played just as great a role in families’ continued residency within company towns, and their subsequent immobility, as the men’s employment. I emphasize the importance of specificity in this research, illustrating how generalizations too easily obfuscate the agency of already underrepresented people in history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow