The general understanding of female participation in the mines is that women did not enter mine shafts, were confined in domestic labor, and earned far less than men when performing side activities such as hauling and ores washing. However, the adoption of a broader and more inclusive idea of work – one that is not exclusively associated with earning a monetary wage – sheds new light on women’s contribution in pivotal activities for the mining industry. The panel adopts this perspective to empasize women’s participation in a wide range of tasks, including prospecting for precious metals, distributing wealth within the mining community, trading shares in mining companies, and providing unpaid labor in the household.

The panel builds strongly on interdisciplinary research: the panellists approach women’s work with a variety of methods and types of evidence, such as colonial archives, scholarly manuscripts, administrative sources, and oral histories of working activities. Each contributor examines women’s experiences in mining during the emergence of capitalist and extractive industries to offer new perspectives on the continuities of gender segregation, women’s knowledge, and care work across Europe and the Americas. The papers will cover a wide range of historical contexts, including Renaissance Italy, Britain’s financial revolution, colonial Mexico’s silver mining, and the late nineteenth-century Michigan’s copper industry.

From the vantage point of a long-term and global perspective on mining women, the panel will address questions such as: What was women’s role in predominantly masculine workplaces, and how did it evolve across different times and locations? How did women’s bodies and knowledge contribute to mining initiatives during the early modern and industrialization periods? And how can the study of mining women challenge long-standing divisions between categories of ‘paid’ and ‘unpaid’ work, ‘free’ and ‘coerced’ labor, and ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ knowledge?