The Maternal Practice of "Taking in Boarders" in Michigan Copper Mines

In 1910, Annie Wilcox, a 50-year-old immigrant from Cornwall, cared for her husband (who had become physically disabled while working as a copper miner), two sons, and 6 male boarders in her modest house in Michigan’s Copper Country. Yet, according to the U.S. census for that year, her occupation, work or trade was “none.” Annie’s story is evocative of many women in industrial communities, whose work “taking in boarders” in their homes allowed their families to survive. This was especially the case in industrial mining communities where the risk of injury and death for miners was notably acute.

Previous histories of the copper mining region in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have focused on various forms of mining company paternalism during the peak years of production, 1880-1920. Mining companies arbitrarily cared for or abandoned mining families of men injured or killed on the job, especially prior to the passage of the state’s workers’ compensation law in 1912. Left to care and provide for their families, some women, like Annie, offered a sort of maternalism that formed when corporate paternalism failed mining families and before the creation of later social safety nets.

This study investigates women’s “silent” labor in caring for an providing for their families and other miner workers whom they “took in” as boarders. By exploring their historical experience through census records, oral histories, interviews, and extant dwellings, this presentation addresses women’s creation of a maternal safety net that is often “invisible” or silent in the standard historical narrative and wage-labor-based economy.