For three generations, Tanya James’ family has worked in the coal mines of West Virginia. Tanya is no different. She began working in the mines in 1979, when only about 1 in 100 coal miners were women—and she didn’t begin under the happiest of circumstances.
Her father died when she was 17, leaving her mother to take care of the family. Out of necessity, Tanya’s mother took a mining class, and Tanya would go down with her every day—so the instructor invited Tanya to join the class. Six months later, Tanya was working in the mines as well.
“I know what it feels like to have your mother in the mines. And it could be a little rough,” Tanya James, now a mother herself, tells her daughters Michelle Paugh and Trista James on a recent visit with StoryCorps. “I was pretty protective of her, even though I knew she could protect herself. I saw her once pick up a guy by the neck,” she laughs, “so she was a tough cookie.”
From an early age, Tanya James says, she learned an important lesson from her mother: “If you don’t fight for yourself, nobody else gonna do it for you.”
That attitude helped give her the strength to deal with an environment that wasn’t exactly welcoming to women. It was a long-held suspicion among miners that it was bad luck for a woman to even enter a mine. When a woman did enter one, many people figured, it was just to find a man.
And that’s to say nothing of the dangers awaiting her in the deeps from the men themselves. In a survey that came out of the 1980 National Conference of Women Coal Miners, it was found that 76 percent of female coal miners had been sexually offended by coworkers. Seventeen percent had been physically attacked.
“You had to make them respect you. You had to prove yourself daily,” Tanya says. “I don’t believe in stuff being handed to you. I think you need to work for everything you get.”
Tanya James spent more than 20 years in the coal mines, and recently she became the first woman to hold a seat on the international executive board of the United Mine Workers of America.
She’s tried to convince her daughters of what she believed. “You’re an extraordinary woman,” her daughter Trista said to her, “and I would like to be one in the future, too.”
1. Why did Tanya start working as a coal miner?
2. What does the underlined phrase “a tough cookie” in Paragraph 3 most probably mean?
3. What did many people think was a woman’s motive for being a coal miner?
4. How were most female coal-miners treated in the USA according to the 1980 survey?
5. What did Tanya James teach her two daughters?
