By the Sweat of Their Brow by Angela V John

By the Sweat of Their Brow by Angela V John

The pit brow lasses who sorted coal and performed a variety of jobs above ground at British coal mines prompted a violent debate about women's work in the nineteenth century.

Seen as the prime example of degraded womanhood, the pit brow woman was regarded as an aberration in a masculine domain, cruelly torn from her 'natural sphere', the home. The, attempt to restrict women's work at the mines in the 1880s highlights the dichotomy between the fashionable ideal of womanhood and the necessity and reality of female manual labour.

Although only a tiny percentage of the colliery labour force, the pit lasses aroused an interest out of all proportion to their numbers and their work became a test case for women's outdoor manual employment. Angela John discusses the implications of this debate, showing how it encapsulates many of the ambivalences of late Victorian attitudes towards working-class female employment, and at the same time raises wider questions both about women's work in industries seen as traditionally male enclaves, and about the ways in which women within the working community have been presented by historians.This book was first published in 1980.

Angela V. John is a widely published historian and biographer living in Pembrokeshire but originally from Port Talbot. Her previous biographical subjects include Lady Charlotte Guest, Elizabeth Robins, Henry W. Nevinson and, most recently, Margaret Haig Thomas, otherwise known as Lady Rhondda. In 2010 Angela's biography Rebel Woman: 1869-1955 was longlisted for the biennial Portico Prize for Literature.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780710201423
ISBN 10	0710201427
Title	By the Sweat of Their Brow
Author	Angela V John
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Taylor & Francis Ltd
Year published	1984-02-16
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.