“Fightin' and Fuckin':” Cultural Implications of Institutionalized Forced Sexual Servitude In the Early Appalachian Coal Industry (1890 – 1970)

• In Event: Reclaiming Lost Stories

Abstract

A well-established pattern of sexual servitude exacted by early coal operators through their company stores kept generations of coal camp women besieged with traumatic shock and mortification. These whispered, demeaning coal company practices, long ignored by regional scholars and historians, weakened the fabric and structure of many working families at a time when the miners' Union was struggling to gain a foothold in the extractive State of West Virginia. Since my publication, “Esau in the Coal Fields: Owing Our Souls to the Company Store,” appeared in Dead Ringers (Wess Harris, ed., Appalachian Educational Services, 2012), other coal field residents have stepped forward with testimonials about the criminal treatment of their mothers and grandmothers by company operatives in generations passed. The resulting hard-fisted, social chaos during the mine wars and beyond spawned a sustained atmosphere of domestic abuse and oppressive degradation in the work place for numerous coal camp wives and daughters. This culture of widespread abuse of women, along with aggravated, fists-on quarreling among men, was provoked daily by armed company mine guards (“thugs”) in their obsession to stamp out solidarity among working families when organized labor came calling. Two interviews recorded over the past ten months offer further evidence of a legacy of criminal sexual abuse of women and girls dating from the early coal boom to more recent times in the betrayed State of West Virginia. What are the deep-seated cultural ramifications of this legacy and how has it affected who we are today?

Author

• Michael Nobel Kline, Talking Across the Lines