The eviction that got written out of mining history
The stock image of a miner — the brawny figure at the coal face, the gold-rush prospector — is about as masculine as an occupational stereotype gets. According to scholars Rossana Barragán Romano and Leda Papastefanaki, women have mined around the world throughout history, and early modern mining was a household affair in which every member of a family took on mining tasks. Women, they write, "were as active as miners in the past as they are in the present."
They also give a mechanism for the discrepancy. Mining came to be considered — and legislated — as men's work, which they argue largely erased women from its recorded history. Over two centuries, women were evicted from European and North American mines as "protective" laws barred them from working in them.
The erasure has a present-tense cost. Today, in some countries, women can make up as much as half of the millions of people working in artisanal and small-scale mining, the sector the UN and World Bank call ASM — work the scholars describe as often taking place under the worst and most precarious conditions. That makes this more than a question about the archive: it also concerns whose work gets noticed in the present.
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Calling these laws protective casts exclusion as care. The scholars' account makes that language difficult to separate from the loss of women's visibility in mining history.
The household framing matters: if early modern mining involved the whole family, its later masculine image cannot simply be treated as a timeless description of the work.