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 answer...