REST IN POWER
As a young lawyer in the 1970s, she helped open the coal industry to women and fought on their behalf for workplace equality and safety.
WASHINGTON POST
August 28, 2024
Betty Jean Hall grew up in the coal country of eastern Kentucky, a place where thousands of men braved the heavy darkness of the mines, the gruesome injuries that often befell them deep inside the earth and the agony of one of their occupation’s most infamous hazards, black lung disease. The men emerged from the mines at the end of a shift dirty and exhausted but proud, having provided for their families with another day’s work.
August 28, 2024
Betty Jean Hall grew up in the coal country of eastern Kentucky, a place where thousands of men braved the heavy darkness of the mines, the gruesome injuries that often befell them deep inside the earth and the agony of one of their occupation’s most infamous hazards, black lung disease. The men emerged from the mines at the end of a shift dirty and exhausted but proud, having provided for their families with another day’s work.
Never, Ms. Hall later reflected, did she ever encounter a woman who worked in the mines or even entertained such a possibility. Mining was a man’s job. The mere presence of a women in a mine, as on a ship at sea, was reputed to bring bad luck. Even the vast majority of clerks and secretaries employed by coal companies were men.
Only a few years out of law school in the 1970s, Ms. Hall — who died Aug. 16 at 78 — helped change the mining industry in ways that coal country scarcely could have imagined when she was a girl.
As the founder of the Coal Employment Project (CEP) based in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Ms. Hall filed a federal complaint in 1978 against 153 coal companies, alleging that together they embodied “one of the most blatantly discriminatory” industries in the United States and demanding that the companies open their ranks to women.
In the years that followed, Ms. Hall and her fellow organizers won legal settlements providing back pay for women who had been denied mining jobs — as well as future hiring commitments from mining companies. For essentially the first time, women in Appalachia and other coal-producing regions could pursue the jobs that in many cases offered their only hope of supporting themselves and their families.
Ms. Hall, who later helped female miners organize a national network of advocacy groups and chaired a U.S. Labor Department review board that handled compensation claims related to black lung disease, died at a hospital in Cary, N.C. Her daughter, Tiffany Olsen, confirmed her death and said she did not know the cause.
Women have ventured into mines in small numbers for generations, posing as men by necessity to earn a paycheck. During World War II, they took on jobs previously held by men who were away at war. But not until 1973 or 1974 — accounts vary — was a woman officially hired as a mine worker in the United States.
In the early years of her legal practice, Ms. Hall was drawn to both public-interest law and the feminist movement, and she combined her interests in a campaign on behalf of female miners.
She confessed that she at first doubted many women would be interested in mining, which was one of the country’s most dangerous professions. But, as she learned, in many places mining offered the only path to gainful employment.
“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” Ms. Hall told the New York Times in 1979, “but so is housework and so is working in sewing factories for minimum wages. Just about all the women I’ve talked to agree that if they have to choose between making $6,000 a year in a factory and mining coal for $60 or more a day, they’ll go into the mines.”
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Mine worker Charlene Griggs operates a roof bolter in Alabama in 1983. (Marat Moore)
She recalled one person in particular, a woman named Mavis from eastern Kentucky, who convinced her, as Ms. Hall later wrote, that “we were really on to something.” Mavis was a single mother of four who had been turned down for a mining job on the grounds that the work was too hard for a woman.
“I thought back to when my two youngest were still in diapers and we lived on top of a hill with no running water,” Ms. Hall recalled Mavis saying. “Every morning, even in the dead of winter, I had to bundle up those two babies and all their dirty diapers and carry them down the hill to wash out the diapers in the creek. And I had to carry those two babies, and all those wet diapers, back up the hill. I figured if I could do that, there wasn’t any job in the mines I couldn’t do.”
The federal complaint accused coal companies of violating an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating in employment on the basis of sex, among other factors. Most of the country’s largest coal companies had federal contracts.
Statistics on the numbers of female miners vary. But by Ms. Hall’s count, within five years of the complaint’s filing there were 3,370 women working in mines. That figure, which represented less than 2 percent of all miners, was still a momentous gain.
“She really spearheaded the most massive influx [of women] into underground coal mining historically,” said Suzanne Tallichet, a professor of sociology at Morehead State University in Kentucky and the author of the book “Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia.”
In addition to helping women obtain mining work, Ms. Hall cultivated a national movement to demand equal treatment on the job, where women were often assigned the most taxing duties, such as shoveling coal onto a conveyor belt, and were frequently passed over for promotions.
At first, many coal companies failed to provide for even the most basic needs of their female employees. Steel-toed boots were not made in women’s sizes, forcing female miners to stuff their shoes and putting them at risk of falls, said Marat Moore, who worked in a West Virginia coal mine and later wrote the book “Women in the Mines.” Rubber gloves, oversized because they were made for men, sometimes got caught in machinery, causing the women who wore them to lose a finger or an arm.
Sexual harassment was rampant, with lewd graffiti often scrawled on the walls of mines. Ms. Hall documented cases of male workers drilling peepholes into the showers of their female colleagues. In the most extreme cases, women were sexually assaulted underground, where they had no way to escape.
The National Conference of Women Miners, which Ms. Hall helped grow, addressed risks posed to pregnant women working underground as well as the health hazards borne by all miners, male and female. The group also was credited with rallying support for the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, a measure that protected employees who previously might have risked losing their jobs by missing work to care for a sick family member.
By the end of the 1980s, many female mine workers had been laid off as demand for coal decreased and technological advances made some of their jobs obsolete. Under the “last hired, first fired” union principle, the women, who had less seniority than their male co-workers, were often the first to go.
Among the thousands of miners who benefited from Ms. Hall’s work is Libby Lindsay, who worked for 21 years for a Bethlehem Steel coal mine in Boone County, W.Va. Lindsay, the daughter of a coal miner, grew up listening to her father speak about the camaraderie he found in his union and among the men who went down into the mines together. She begged to go with him to union meetings, only to be told that girls weren’t allowed.
By founding the CEP and by encouraging the women to organize on behalf of one another, Lindsay said in an interview, Ms. Hall “helped to forge a sisterhood that continues today.”
Betty Jean Hall was born on July 12, 1946, in Richmond, Ky., and grew up farther to the state’s east in Buckhorn. Her father, a woodworker, became a professor of industrial arts at Berea College in Berea, Ky., and her mother managed the home.
Ms. Hall received a bachelor’s degree in history from Berea College in 1968. She worked at the Appalachian Regional Commission before enrolling at the Antioch School of Law in Washington, a predecessor to the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, where she graduated in 1976.
She was running a law practice in Washington when she was contacted by a public-interest group that had asked to tour a Tennessee mine and was told that only men would be permitted to go because they “can’t have no woman going underground.”
“That one incident really started us thinking,” Ms. Hall told the Times. “If men won’t even let a woman tour a mine, how does she go about finding a job in one?”
One of the CEP’s first grants came from the Ms. Foundation for Women, the fledging organization co-founded by feminist activist Gloria Steinem.
Ms. Hall’s legal strategies were applied to highway construction and other professions that, like the coal industry, had traditionally excluded women, said Barbara Ellen Smith, who worked with Ms. Hall at the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition and later became a professor of women’s and gender studies at Virginia Tech.
Ms. Hall served for years on the Labor Department’s Benefits Review Board, including 10 years as chair and chief administrative appeals judge, before retiring in 2019.
She was separated from her husband, Thomas Burke, when he died in 2022. Her twin children — her daughter, of Cary, and her son, Timothy Burke, of Carrboro, N.C. — survive her, as do a sister and two grandchildren.
Although mines remain largely the domain of male workers, the success of Ms. Hall’s campaign was captured in a remark that labor leader Richard Trumka, then president of the United Mine Workers of America and later the president of the AFL-CIO, made to a gathering of the National Conference of Women Miners in 1983.
“Male miners believed that for a woman to go in a mine was bad luck,” he said. “I think most men in the mines today would agree it’s been our good luck, not our bad luck, that you joined our ranks in the mines.”
By Emily LangerEmily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk. She writes about extraordinary lives in national and international affairs, science and the arts, sports, culture, and beyond. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections. Twitter
As the founder of the Coal Employment Project (CEP) based in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Ms. Hall filed a federal complaint in 1978 against 153 coal companies, alleging that together they embodied “one of the most blatantly discriminatory” industries in the United States and demanding that the companies open their ranks to women.
In the years that followed, Ms. Hall and her fellow organizers won legal settlements providing back pay for women who had been denied mining jobs — as well as future hiring commitments from mining companies. For essentially the first time, women in Appalachia and other coal-producing regions could pursue the jobs that in many cases offered their only hope of supporting themselves and their families.
Ms. Hall, who later helped female miners organize a national network of advocacy groups and chaired a U.S. Labor Department review board that handled compensation claims related to black lung disease, died at a hospital in Cary, N.C. Her daughter, Tiffany Olsen, confirmed her death and said she did not know the cause.
Women have ventured into mines in small numbers for generations, posing as men by necessity to earn a paycheck. During World War II, they took on jobs previously held by men who were away at war. But not until 1973 or 1974 — accounts vary — was a woman officially hired as a mine worker in the United States.
In the early years of her legal practice, Ms. Hall was drawn to both public-interest law and the feminist movement, and she combined her interests in a campaign on behalf of female miners.
She confessed that she at first doubted many women would be interested in mining, which was one of the country’s most dangerous professions. But, as she learned, in many places mining offered the only path to gainful employment.
“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” Ms. Hall told the New York Times in 1979, “but so is housework and so is working in sewing factories for minimum wages. Just about all the women I’ve talked to agree that if they have to choose between making $6,000 a year in a factory and mining coal for $60 or more a day, they’ll go into the mines.”
She recalled one person in particular, a woman named Mavis from eastern Kentucky, who convinced her, as Ms. Hall later wrote, that “we were really on to something.” Mavis was a single mother of four who had been turned down for a mining job on the grounds that the work was too hard for a woman.
“I thought back to when my two youngest were still in diapers and we lived on top of a hill with no running water,” Ms. Hall recalled Mavis saying. “Every morning, even in the dead of winter, I had to bundle up those two babies and all their dirty diapers and carry them down the hill to wash out the diapers in the creek. And I had to carry those two babies, and all those wet diapers, back up the hill. I figured if I could do that, there wasn’t any job in the mines I couldn’t do.”
The federal complaint accused coal companies of violating an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating in employment on the basis of sex, among other factors. Most of the country’s largest coal companies had federal contracts.
Statistics on the numbers of female miners vary. But by Ms. Hall’s count, within five years of the complaint’s filing there were 3,370 women working in mines. That figure, which represented less than 2 percent of all miners, was still a momentous gain.
“She really spearheaded the most massive influx [of women] into underground coal mining historically,” said Suzanne Tallichet, a professor of sociology at Morehead State University in Kentucky and the author of the book “Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia.”
In addition to helping women obtain mining work, Ms. Hall cultivated a national movement to demand equal treatment on the job, where women were often assigned the most taxing duties, such as shoveling coal onto a conveyor belt, and were frequently passed over for promotions.
At first, many coal companies failed to provide for even the most basic needs of their female employees. Steel-toed boots were not made in women’s sizes, forcing female miners to stuff their shoes and putting them at risk of falls, said Marat Moore, who worked in a West Virginia coal mine and later wrote the book “Women in the Mines.” Rubber gloves, oversized because they were made for men, sometimes got caught in machinery, causing the women who wore them to lose a finger or an arm.
Sexual harassment was rampant, with lewd graffiti often scrawled on the walls of mines. Ms. Hall documented cases of male workers drilling peepholes into the showers of their female colleagues. In the most extreme cases, women were sexually assaulted underground, where they had no way to escape.
The National Conference of Women Miners, which Ms. Hall helped grow, addressed risks posed to pregnant women working underground as well as the health hazards borne by all miners, male and female. The group also was credited with rallying support for the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, a measure that protected employees who previously might have risked losing their jobs by missing work to care for a sick family member.
By the end of the 1980s, many female mine workers had been laid off as demand for coal decreased and technological advances made some of their jobs obsolete. Under the “last hired, first fired” union principle, the women, who had less seniority than their male co-workers, were often the first to go.
Among the thousands of miners who benefited from Ms. Hall’s work is Libby Lindsay, who worked for 21 years for a Bethlehem Steel coal mine in Boone County, W.Va. Lindsay, the daughter of a coal miner, grew up listening to her father speak about the camaraderie he found in his union and among the men who went down into the mines together. She begged to go with him to union meetings, only to be told that girls weren’t allowed.
By founding the CEP and by encouraging the women to organize on behalf of one another, Lindsay said in an interview, Ms. Hall “helped to forge a sisterhood that continues today.”
Betty Jean Hall was born on July 12, 1946, in Richmond, Ky., and grew up farther to the state’s east in Buckhorn. Her father, a woodworker, became a professor of industrial arts at Berea College in Berea, Ky., and her mother managed the home.
Ms. Hall received a bachelor’s degree in history from Berea College in 1968. She worked at the Appalachian Regional Commission before enrolling at the Antioch School of Law in Washington, a predecessor to the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, where she graduated in 1976.
She was running a law practice in Washington when she was contacted by a public-interest group that had asked to tour a Tennessee mine and was told that only men would be permitted to go because they “can’t have no woman going underground.”
“That one incident really started us thinking,” Ms. Hall told the Times. “If men won’t even let a woman tour a mine, how does she go about finding a job in one?”
One of the CEP’s first grants came from the Ms. Foundation for Women, the fledging organization co-founded by feminist activist Gloria Steinem.
Ms. Hall’s legal strategies were applied to highway construction and other professions that, like the coal industry, had traditionally excluded women, said Barbara Ellen Smith, who worked with Ms. Hall at the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition and later became a professor of women’s and gender studies at Virginia Tech.
Ms. Hall served for years on the Labor Department’s Benefits Review Board, including 10 years as chair and chief administrative appeals judge, before retiring in 2019.
She was separated from her husband, Thomas Burke, when he died in 2022. Her twin children — her daughter, of Cary, and her son, Timothy Burke, of Carrboro, N.C. — survive her, as do a sister and two grandchildren.
Although mines remain largely the domain of male workers, the success of Ms. Hall’s campaign was captured in a remark that labor leader Richard Trumka, then president of the United Mine Workers of America and later the president of the AFL-CIO, made to a gathering of the National Conference of Women Miners in 1983.
“Male miners believed that for a woman to go in a mine was bad luck,” he said. “I think most men in the mines today would agree it’s been our good luck, not our bad luck, that you joined our ranks in the mines.”
By Emily LangerEmily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk. She writes about extraordinary lives in national and international affairs, science and the arts, sports, culture, and beyond. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections. Twitter
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