Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West

Winner of the 2018 Distinguished Book Award from the Western Social Science Association

Though mining is an infamously masculine industry, women make up 20 percent of all production crews in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the United States. How do these women fit into a working culture supposedly hostile to females? This is what anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, herself a onetime mine worker and the daughter of a miner, set out to discover. Her answe...