NEW YORK TIMES
Betty Jean Hall, a fiery lawyer from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky who brought successful complaints against big coal companies for discriminating against women, paving the way for thousands of them to secure jobs in the industry, died on Aug. 16 in Cary, N.C., near Raleigh. She was 78.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Tiffany Olsen, who did not provide a cause.
In 1977, Ms. Hall embarked on a seemingly unlikely campaign: putting women in coal mines. It was a matter of simple economics for her and for thousands of other women in Appalachia, one of America’s poorest regions. Coal mining jobs could pay three times as much as alternatives like waitressing or teaching.
That year, Ms. Hall founded the Coal Employment Project in Jacksboro, Tenn., and got a $5,000 grant from the Ms. Foundation, which had been established several years earlier by Gloria Steinem and others. In the spring of 1978, Ms. Hall filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor against 153 coal companies for discriminating against women.
By December 1978, Consolidation Coal Company, a major mine operator, agreed to pay $370,000 to 70 women who had been denied jobs, and to hire one woman for every four men.
By 1989, nearly 4,000 women had gone into the mines, according to Marat Moore, author of “Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work” (1996). In 1973, there had been zero.
Before filing the 1978 complaint, Ms. Hall later told an interviewer, “we held a press conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. We had two women miners there in their hard hats, steel-toed boots and safety belts, as well as a woman who had been trying to get a mining job — all explaining why they didn’t want their daughters and sisters to have to face the same kind of problems they were facing.”
In a 1981 film, “Coalmining Women,” she explained: “In some communities coal is about the only good paying jobs there are. It’s a big thing when a woman can really honest-to-goodness make a decent living.”
Ms. Hall rode the crest of a new feminism that was beginning to flex its muscles in the law, employment and elsewhere. But she didn’t talk about her transformational work in ideological terms. Rather, her motivations were practical.
“It occurred to me that even though I had grown up in Kentucky, I didn’t know a single woman miner,” she told The New York Times in a 1979 profile.
“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” she added. “But so is house work and so is working in sewing factories for minimum wages. Just about all the women I’ve talked to agree that if they have to choose between making $6,000 a year in a factory and mining coal for $60 or more a day, they’ll go into the mines.”
But the obstacles, initially at least, were considerable. “She took them all on, premier law firms,” said Jim Branscome, who in the late 1960s hired Ms. Hall to work with him at the fledgling Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal development agency. He later helped with early publicity efforts for the Coal Employment Project.
A diminutive woman, Ms. Hall could nevertheless be a commanding presence.
“She was barely five feet tall, but she just stood tall in the courtroom,” Mr. Branscome said in an interview. “She was just totally fearless. The coal companies were absolutely astonished. They had never had this happen to them before. The impact was far greater than just jobs.”
Ms. Hall’s efforts had a large social effect on the region. “Women going into the mines helped to make Appalachia more a part of some of the positive things that were happening around women in America at that time,” said Kipp Dawson, a social activist and friend of Ms. Hall’s who spent 13 years in the mines. “For her, opening the door to get women in mines was a personal crusade.”
Ms. Hall piloted the Coal Employment Project until 1988. The organization itself lasted until 1996; by then, with the waning of the industry, the need for it had diminished. Along the way she held conferences for female miners about training, safety and sexual harassment on the job. And she won public service awards.
In 2001, Ms. Hall was made an appeals judge for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Benefits Review Board. She later became chief judge, then chair of the board, retiring in 2019.
Betty Jean Hall was born on July 12, 1946, in Buckhorn, in southeast Kentucky, to Jim Hall, a teacher, and Lillian Hall. She attended schools in Buckhorn and nearby Berea and graduated with a degree in history from Berea College, where her father was head of the woodworking department.
She received her law degree in 1976 from Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C. Antioch was a new school where “you had to prove in some way that you had an activist background,” Ms. Hall said in 2022 in an oral history interview with West Virginia University. By 1979, after founding the Coal Employment Project, she had “brought historic change to the industry,” The Times wrote.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Olsen, Ms. Hall is survived by her son, Tim Hall; two grandchildren; and a sister, Janet Hall Smith.
“My mother believed in the underdog,” her daughter said. “She gave up a high-priced legal career to help the underadvantaged.”
Connect with us on our socials: