working-class women activists also challenge and defy separate spheres conventions through their work to end MTR. By participating in grassroots groups such as the Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, they publicly exert collective agency that can also be personally empowering. In coal-rich sections of Appalachia, separate spheres ideology and its manifestation in the lives of real people existed prior to the industry’s formation in the region, and some Appalachian scholars correctly note that these white, middle-class gender conventions were unavailable to the Native American, African American, and poor white women in Appalachia.66 Regardless of their existence prior to the entrance of coal in West Virginia, the inherent class and race partialities in these social constructs, gender ideologies, and cultural notions of the best and most natural spaces for men and women became uniquely solidified with the rise of industrialization in the Western world, including in the coalfields of West Virginia.
When examining the historical roots of separate spheres ideology, Ann Crittenden argues that the social, political, and economic manifestation of these beliefs discouraged women from public participation and expanded their responsibilities within the home, while simultaneously sanctioning men’s withdrawal from the domestic sphere.67 Additionally, Crittenden reveals the intrinsic class bias connected to this gendered social construction by arguing that the cultural weight applied to domestic duties, particularly child-rearing, was more than just a “strategy to distract women from participating in public life. It was also necessary to the development of a vibrant capitalist economy. . . . The rising bourgeoisie understood that their children would have to become educated, motivated little achievers if they were going to improve or even maintain their station in life.”68 In short, the emphasis on this new family, and the roles men and women were to assume within this arrangement, was a way in which the burgeoning middle class could distinguish itself from working-class white families and families of color. This new family structure was viewed as a modern construct, signifying the progress and enlightenment of all those who conformed to its dictates. Judith Stacey argues this newly touted industrial family form became a powerful symbol for modernity, signifying a break from the largely agrarian, traditional past. She contends that in the United States,
the modern family system arose in the nineteenth century when industrialization turned men into breadwinners and women into homemakers by separating paid work from households. Beginning first among white, middle-class people, this family pattern came to represent modernity and success. Indeed, the American way of life came to be so identified with this family form that the trade-union movement struggled for nearly a century to secure for male workers the material condition upon which it was based—the male breadwinner wage.69
As these modern gender ideologies and family arrangements gained traction in Western culture, many coalfield women retreated to the home, caring for husbands and children while becoming increasingly dependent upon male wages for material sustenance. Arguably, in rural areas such as the Appalachian coalfields, white middle-class social norms in gender and family were particularly influential, as many strived to conform to this model out of fear of being further seen as “backward” or “uncivilized” by those outside the region, particularly in urban areas of the country. Furthermore, these emerging ideas were utilized and emphasized by the coal industry to better control its workforce and ensure business success.
In particular, the formation of the “company town” in coalfield communities regulated and influenced the social and economic lives of residents, primarily through its use of nascent separate spheres ideologies. Over the years scholars have examined the coal camp system and its influence in Appalachian towns. John Alexander Williams, for example, has argued that these sparsely populated, remote rural areas dictated the formation of company towns where coal operators enjoyed “captive communities” to use in ways that best served their needs.70 Williams notes how each town was segregated in terms of the race and nationality of families living in the coalfields, but does not note the dissimilar roles of women and men in these communities and how these differences were exploited by the industry.71 Because gender is a fundamental but often overlooked social category, feminist redress of the absence of examinations of women’s lives in the company town system is a crucial addition to the historical record. Mary Beth Pudup notes the importance of gender in family settlements in the coalfields, and the intrinsic economic necessity for these coal camp arrangements:
Operators quickly learned that in a rural state like West Virginia providing housing for workers was a necessary complement to opening a mine. Operators eschewed options like housing miners in boardinghouses and paying another work force to provide services like cooking and laundry. Instead, operators both large and small chose to build company towns encouraging family settlement where wives would provide personal services to the work force. This strategy implicitly recognized the economic value of women’s domestic labor.72
During this transformation, many West Virginia men entered the productive, public, albeit dirty and dangerous work of coal mining, gaining their cultural identity as hardworking patriarchs who risked their lives for the socioeconomic survival of their families. While men worked in exploited, unsafe working conditions, and received very little pay, they enjoyed autonomy, cultural privilege, and power at home, a sanctuary away from their public life as industrial workers. As some West Virginia women further retreated into the private sphere of home, the acceptable cultural identities as wives and mothers became more entrenched in coalfield culture. The value of women’s domestic work to coal industry security and profitability are also noted by Janet W. Greene, who characterizes coal camps as women’s workshops:
Their primary work was critical to coal production: they fed the miner, washed his clothes, took care of him when sick or injured, and raised the children who would become the next generation of mineworkers. They added to the family income by performing domestic work for other families, produced goods for use in the home, and scavenged and bartered.73
Women’s highly productive but unpaid labor for the coal industry is a fundamental component of its success in Appalachia. While some West Virginia women also worked for wages, particularly white working-class women and women of color, many public means of adequate employment were unavailable to coalfield women, and both their class and gender positions became increasingly compromised. Moreover, they received no sanctuary away from their work as wives and mothers of working-class coal miners. This arrangement served not only miners and coal operators but also early investors in this profitable resource extraction industry. Sally Ward Maggard suggests coalfield gender ideologies helped establish family patterns and systematize the coal industry in West Virginia, where coal towns had numerous “disciplined miners” and women who “provided the unpaid domestic work to support the miner labor force and increase profits for coal owners and stockholders,” who, invariably, were located outside the state.74
While gender and family arrangements in the United States have changed since the early nineteenth century, with many more women working outside the home for wages and some men providing domestic care for their families, separate spheres ideology still has tremendous cultural and economic currency inside and outside of Appalachia. Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner note that “despite its relatively short history, and the rather narrow cross section of the population to which the definition applies, its impact on society in the spheres of culture, politics, economics, and even psychology has been strong.”75 In sharper language, Judith Stacey highlights the idealistic nature of this family arrangement and the gendered ideology that supports it, revealing that current family systems are, in fact, much more diverse and complicated:
The family indeed is dead, if what we mean by it is the modern family system in which units comprising male breadwinner and female homemaker, married couples, and their offspring dominate the land. But its ghost, the ideology of the family, survives to haunt the consciousness of all those who refuse to confront it. It is time to perform a social autopsy on the corpse of the modern family system so that we may try to lay its troublesome spirit to rest.76
In short, gendered social patterns have
