Papers of Kristen R. Yount, 1980-2004 (inclusive), 1980-1983 (bulk)

This collection documents the integration of women workers into three coal mines in Colorado and five coal mines in Utah during the 1970s and early 1980s. This collection includes 188 audiocassettes, 60 transcripts, conference materials, and related articles by Kristen R. Yount. The oral history interviews were conducted by Yount for her doctoral dissertation. Yount's focus was the integration of women into traditionally male jobs, and her research emphasized the multiple challenges faced by the female coal miners, including sexual harassment, gender discrimination, lack of seniority in the coal mining unions, lack of appropriately-sized protective clothing, and hostility from the male miner's wives. Most of the coal miners interviewed had worked with each other at one time; some overlapped at multiple mines.

Between 1980 and 1986, Yount interviewed 44 women and 37 men individually, or with their spouses, held six group discussions, and held short interviews at four national conferences sponsored by the Coal Employment Project. Yount also recorded workshops and group discussions at these conferences. She asked many of the same questions to both male and female miners, and loosely followed an outline for each interview. Questions asked in these interviews included the male miners' perspective on women in the mines; the work ethic of male and female miners; the miners' opinion of the women's liberation movement; the physical strength of women and their inability to do some of the tasks in the mines; accidents and death in mines; menstruation and sanitation problems underground; old superstitions of women being bad luck in mines; how long each miner had worked in the coal mining industry; training received; differences between union and non-union mines; the reactions to bad language and sexual jokes of both male and female miners; the miner's personal lives; reputations of the women who chose to work in the mines; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the Coal Employment Project; the American Civil Liberties Union; and racism found among the miners.

Many of the women interviewed discussed the difficulty of obtaining the training needed for most of the positions in the mine, such as roof bolter, pinner operator, engineer, mechanic, beltline fire boss, and mantrip operator. The women also stated that female miners were not generally allowed to work at the face of the mine, where the coal was actually being mined, and were relegated to the general labor positions. Some of the male coal miners Yount interviewed expressed the opinion that any woman who went to work in a coal mine was only there to find a husband, and therefore the men felt free to flirt or sexually harass them. Three of the women Yount interviewed in 1980 were not miners or married to miners. They discussed the community as a whole, as well as their personal lives. Two of these women were members of the Happy Heart Extension Homemakers Club, which offered community activities, fund raisers, and bake sales in town.

This collection also includes documents from the four Coal Employment Project national conferences attended by Yount. The Coal Employment Project was founded in 1977, after a female staff member of the East Tennessee Research Corporation was denied entry to an underground mine during a tour of a mining facility in Campbell County, Tennessee. To investigate whether this violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Coal Employment Project conducted a study to research and document employment practices in the coal mining industry. In 1980, the Coal Employment Project and the Women's Bureau developed a training program to prepare women to enter the coal mining industry.

Of the 80 interviews with individuals, most are represented here by one or more audiocassettes and a typed transcript. One interview contains only a transcript and not an audiocassette. Twenty seven of the interviews were not transcribed, and only audiotapes of these oral histories are available. Yount assured all her interviewees of complete confidentiality. However, many interviewees named other miners included in the project. Where the promised confidentiality has been compromised in this way, tapes and transcripts have been closed. All tapes in this collection are audiocassettes. Yount's original folder headings were maintained. This collection is arranged numerically by interviewee, following Yount's arrangement.