Epilogue

Abstract

In the introduction to this volume, we have identified our subject as “mining and women,” but as the title of the book suggests, there is an alternate agenda. For as labor historians and women’s historians turned “global” historians, we have also been preoccupied with “mining women,” a sort of double entendre which implies that we are also unearthing another aspect of a shared and gendered past—the role of women in mining and the roles of women in relation to the mining industry and to men. This journey through nearly three hundred years of mining history could not have been accomplished without the contributors to this volume, who give meaning and substance to our envisioned past(s). This history would not have been possible without the women and men whose stories people it.