Women Miners in Developing Countries Pit Women and Others [Paperback]

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.Contents: Introduction: Where life is in the pits (and elsewhere) and gendered, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Martha Macintyre. Reconstructing Gendered Histories of Mines: Women miners: here and there, now and then, Gill Burke; Japanese coal mining: women discovered, Sachiko Sone; Race, gender and the tin-mining industry in Malaya, 1900-1950, Amarjit Kaur; Patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism: unearthing the history of Adivasi women miners of Chotanagpur, Shashank S. Sinha. Gender and Ethnic Identities in the Mines: Digging through layers of class, gender and ethnicity: Korean women miners in prewar Japan, W. Donald Smith; Women working in the mining industry in Papua New Guinea: a case study from Lihir, Martha Macintyre; Traditional small scale miners: women miners of the Philippines, Evelyn J. Caballero; Mining gender at work in the Indian collieries: identity construction by Kamins, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. Gender in the Mining Economies: The place of women in mining in the Cordillera region, Philippines, Minerva Chaloping-March; Women in artisanal and small scale mining in Africa, Jennifer J. Hinton, BarblÓp