Energy Supports Us,” and another woman’s read “We Love Our Coal Miners.” Concern for their families and children were also displayed in another sign, “Our Families Work for Massey; Our Kids Go to This School.”93 In addition to the clash at this direct action protest, anti-MTR activists and coal miners and their supporters also collided on Kayford Mountain in Boone County during the annual July 4, 2009, Mountain Keepers Music Festival, sponsored by the Keepers of the Mountain Foundation, headed by Larry Gibson. Twenty pro-Massey residents crashed the festival, antagonizing guests with threats of violence. One angry spouse of a Massey employee expressed job security fears in the face of those critical of the industry by yelling, “You may have another way of livin’, but we don’t.”94
For working-class women associated with Massey Energy miners, fighting for the coal industry is a way to protect the only opportunity to obtain livable wages for their families in the coalfields today. The middle-class FOC women seek to preserve their husbands’ professional positions within this industry. Both groups are motivated by their immediate social and economic interests, and express no interest in the preservation of West Virginia’s mountainous environment. As these women work to secure their class positions, secure their husbands’ coal-related jobs, and promote Big Coal in West Virginia, they also symbolically embrace and conform to separate spheres ideology established long ago. Their focus on job preservation and coal industry stability is viewed as the best way to serve the interests of their families and coalfield communities. Unlike the working-class women in anti-MTR organizations, they do not defy separate spheres social confines and their connections to the industrial production of coal. In addition, the FOC women do not express environmental concerns, believing the coal industry to be good stewards of the Appalachian environment.
Carolyn E. Sachs, a premier scholar in rural and women’s studies, explains the unstable situation between residents who seek to protect the natural environment and improve socioeconomic conditions for all citizens, and those who are dependent upon the offending industry and therefore fiercely protective:
Regions dependent on mining and logging experience boom and bust cycles, high levels of poverty, and extreme sex segregation of jobs. Ownership of land and resources by outside corporate interests minimizes local control and local benefits. . . . Both the mining and timber industries increasingly substitute capital for labor, often with severe environmental consequences. These industries, attempting to increase profits, implement practices such as strip-mining and clear-cutting that result in extreme damage to the environment, rely on large-scale machinery, and use less labor than other types of mining and logging operations. Because jobs are closely tied to the exploitation of natural resources, environmental issues may be hotly contested in such communities.95
Anti-MTR activists are sympathetic with local residents’ fears of unemployment, and most, like the FOC members and the Massey Energy supporters, have family ties to the coal industry. The targets of their activism have never been coal miners and their families, but rather the industry and the state politicians who support it. They are aware that to end the tenure of Big Coal, they have to appeal to local residents and promote alternative jobs for the coalfield economy, although this necessary coalition-building is extremely difficult when Big Coal CEOs such as Don Blankenship stoke the fires of this labor-environment conflict, playing on workers’ job-loss fears.
The working-class women active in anti-MTR campaigns are influenced by traditional notions of distinct social spheres for men and women, particularly in their desire to protect their families, homes, and communities from damages wrought by MTR, yet they also challenge and transgress established coalfield gender ideologies by their very public environmental justice activism. These women are critical of the industry presence in the state, and seek to drive Big Coal from West Virginia by promoting the use of alternative energy sources. Their activism is socially, politically, and economically transgressive in that they use culturally sanctioned gender identities, such as their roles as mothers, wives, and daughters of Appalachia, in subversive, counterhegemonic ways. Rather than working for the benefit of coal-related jobs and the security of the coal industry in an era with rising environmental consciousness, they use gendered notions about women as a justification to change the political-economic hold Big Coal has on the region, to prevent the extinction of their communities, and to save the Appalachian Mountains from further devastation. They are like many women throughout the country, and indeed the world, who are active in community-based, environmental justice groups. When considering working-class women’s activism against environmental problems in their communities, Celene Krauss has argued that ideologies of motherhood, in particular, have led to politicization of some environmental justice activists:
Ideologies of motherhood, traditionally relegated to the private sphere, became political resources that these women used to initiate and justify their resistance and increasing politicization. Rejecting the separation of public and private arenas that renders invisible and insignificant the world of women’s work, they developed a public, more politicized ideology of motherhood that became a resource to fight gender and class oppression.96
Krauss suggests that women working in environmental justice campaigns do not necessarily reject traditional ideologies of women and motherhood but, rather, reinterpret and redirect them into a source of social and political power.97 While many of the anti-MTR activists are mothers who can be viewed as reinterpreting the traditional coalfield gender ideologies and redirecting them into political action, there are some anti-MTR activists who are not mothers or wives. Nevertheless, women, traditional gender ideologies, and political activism are frequently linked, and cited by many women activists when explaining the large presence of women in the movement. For example, former Coal River Mountain Watch codirector Judy Bonds said:
It’s a protection issue. . . . A woman just feels that she has to protect her children, and her grandchildren and her homeplace. And that’s why there is so many women involved in this because we have that instinct inside of us and that stubborn streak and the convictions to protect. . . . Through the traditional people I’ve studied, the women has been the ones that managed things, that protected things, that basically did what they needed to do to protect their children. The mother hen syndrome.98
While Bonds’s comments may strike some feminists as reducing women to their supposed maternal capacities, her activism ultimately challenges traditional notions of women and their place in the public, political arena. Bonds depicts anti-MTR activists as determined, driven women whose resistance is virtually an automatic reaction to the assaults on their homes and communities. Her use of the mother hen metaphor is particularly interesting, as she likens her female counterparts to fierce protectors of home and environment.
Coal River Mountain Watch member Patty Sebok uses similar metaphors when describing her commitment to protecting the community and standing up to the negative forces of coal: “I tell people . . . if you’re in the woods and you see a bear and you see cubs, you know you better stay away from that mama bear. Well, I tell them I’m the proverbial mama bear.”99 Janice Nease, one of the charter members of the CRMW, also believes that many women are active in the anti-MTR movement because, unlike the women protecting the immediate interests of the coal industry in organizations such as the Friends of Coal, and through Massey Energy’s Spousal Groups, women environmental justice activists “see the broad picture and the long picture. They have this long view of what’s going to happen to their children, and . . . they can see ahead.”100 Nease’s comments arise from concerns for the lasting social, economic, and environmental costs of coal in West Virginia.
Most members of OVEC, CRMW, and other grassroots anti-MTR groups are not only working-class white and Cherokee women—many of them wives, mothers, and grandmothers—but women whose homes and communities have been directly impacted by MTR operations. Some have no prior political experience; however, others have participated in regional reform efforts such as labor activities associated with the United Mine Workers of America Union. Some anti-MTR activists did not participate in past labor activist activities but joined these organizations because of environmental concerns. Anti-MTR
