In particular, the formation of the “company town” in coalfield communities regulated and influenced the social and economic lives of residents, primarily through its use of nascent separate spheres ideologies. Over the years scholars have examined the coal camp system and its influence in Appalachian towns. John Alexander Williams, for example, has argued that these sparsely populated, remote rural areas dictated the formation of company towns where coal operators enjoyed “captive communities” to use in ways that best served their needs.70 Williams notes how each town was segregated in terms of the race and nationality of families living in the coalfields, but does not note the dissimilar roles of women and men in these communities and how these differences were exploited by the industry.71 Because gender is a fundamental but often overlooked social category, feminist redress of the absence of examinations of women’s lives in the company town system is a crucial addition to the historical record. Mary Beth Pudup notes the importance of gender in family settlements in the coalfields, and the intrinsic economic necessity for these coal camp arrangements:
Operators quickly learned that in a rural state like West Virginia providing housing for workers was a necessary complement to opening a mine. Operators eschewed options like housing miners in boardinghouses and paying another work force to provide services like cooking and laundry. Instead, operators both large and small chose to build company towns encouraging family settlement where wives would provide personal services to the work force. This strategy implicitly recognized the economic value of women’s domestic labor.72
During this transformation, many West Virginia men entered the productive, public, albeit dirty and dangerous work of coal mining, gaining their cultural identity as hardworking patriarchs who risked their lives for the socioeconomic survival of their families. While men worked in exploited, unsafe working conditions, and received very little pay, they enjoyed autonomy, cultural privilege, and power at home, a sanctuary away from their public life as industrial workers. As some West Virginia women further retreated into the private sphere of home, the acceptable cultural identities as wives and mothers became more entrenched in coalfield culture. The value of women’s domestic work to coal industry security and profitability are also noted by Janet W. Greene, who characterizes coal camps as women’s workshops:
Their primary work was critical to coal production: they fed the miner, washed his clothes, took care of him when sick or injured, and raised the children who would become the next generation of mineworkers. They added to the family income by performing domestic work for other families, produced goods for use in the home, and scavenged and bartered.73
Women’s highly productive but unpaid labor for the coal industry is a fundamental component of its success in Appalachia. While some West Virginia women also worked for wages, particularly white working-class women and women of color, many public means of adequate employment were unavailable to coalfield women, and both their class and gender positions became increasingly compromised. Moreover, they received no sanctuary away from their work as wives and mothers of working-class coal miners. This arrangement served not only miners and coal operators but also early investors in this profitable resource extraction industry. Sally Ward Maggard suggests coalfield gender ideologies helped establish family patterns and systematize the coal industry in West Virginia, where coal towns had numerous “disciplined miners” and women who “provided the unpaid domestic work to support the miner labor force and increase profits for coal owners and stockholders,” who, invariably, were located outside the state.74
While gender and family arrangements in the United States have changed since the early nineteenth century, with many more women working outside the home for wages and some men providing domestic care for their families, separate spheres ideology still has tremendous cultural and economic currency inside and outside of Appalachia. Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner note that “despite its relatively short history, and the rather narrow cross section of the population to which the definition applies, its impact on society in the spheres of culture, politics, economics, and even psychology has been strong.”75 In sharper language, Judith Stacey highlights the idealistic nature of this family arrangement and the gendered ideology that supports it, revealing that current family systems are, in fact, much more diverse and complicated:
The family indeed is dead, if what we mean by it is the modern family system in which units comprising male breadwinner and female homemaker, married couples, and their offspring dominate the land. But its ghost, the ideology of the family, survives to haunt the consciousness of all those who refuse to confront it. It is time to perform a social autopsy on the corpse of the modern family system so that we may try to lay its troublesome spirit to rest.76
In short, gendered social patterns have changed over the years, but these well-established, separate spheres notions about men, women, family, and work continue to inform the culture of West Virginia’s coalfields. Coal operators capitalized on separate spheres ideology to influence coalfield cultural relations and increase profits when the coal industry first began operating in the state, and these ideas are still used to influence its workforce today. Mountaintop removal coal mining is a hotly contested practice in West Virginia, and some citizens work just as hard to protect Big Coal as anti-MTR activists do to stop it. Indeed, the controversy over mountaintop removal has taken the familiar path of job protection versus environmental protection, and many coalfield women choose sides in this divide while the coal industry continues to use gender to serve its own interests. Gender is particularly relevant when we consider how some middle-class and working-class women work to protect the coal industry in this era of mountaintop removal coal mining.
In 2007, the conservative West Virginia grassroots organization Friends of Coal incorporated a new weapon into its arsenal to promote the coal industry and educate the public about the industry’s importance to West Virginia: the Friends of Coal Ladies Auxiliary. Friends of Coal (FOC) is a powerful front group for the West Virginia Coal Association (WVCA), even though they claim independence from the industry. For example, they use the same logo as the West Virginia Coal Association, and if one calls the number given on the FOC website to request “information or supplies,” a secretary for the WVCA answers the phone. FOC is also financially supported by the WVCA and its corporate sponsors. Over the last decade, the presence and influence of Friends of Coal have strengthened, with frequent advertisements to promote the coal industry appearing on television and in local newspapers; on signs posted on residents’ lawns and in the windows of local businesses; and on billboards, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and any number of places. They have inundated the region with pro-coal messages that are impossible to ignore. The FOC organization justifies its existence by asserting that West Virginia “finds itself in danger from environmental zealots,” and the organization seeks to offer a “voice of reason” to the policy debates surrounding mountaintop removal coal mining, which they label “mountaintop mining,” omitting “removal” to soften the public image of the practice.77 Arguably, part of the success of this corporate front group is attributable to the ways in which it uses women to promote and protect the interest of the coal industry.
The FOC Ladies Auxiliary was initiated in 2007 by a “group of concerned women” in the private home of a Raleigh County woman.78 According to the FOC website, the ladies auxiliary does not have “direct economic ties to coal companies,” but works to “enhance the image of coal and combat some of the adverse publicity coal receives on a daily basis in the press and from many organized environmental groups.”79 The Ladies Auxiliary is self-described as an “unbiased group” whose mission is to “educate the public and raise the awareness of citizens to the benefits of coal” and its importance “as part of our national energy plan.”80 Perusing the scant amount of literature available on FOC and the Ladies Auxiliary (FOCLA) reveals that members are primarily middle-class white women whose husbands have ties to the coal industry. For example, Warren Hylton, husband of FOCLA member Patty Hylton, is a local businessman from a prominent Beckley, West Virginia,