Betty Jean Hall, advocate who paved the way for women to enter coal mining workforce, dies at 78

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Betty Jean Hall, an Appalachian attorney and federal administrative judge who paved the way for women to enter the coal mining workforce, has died. She was 78.

Hall died Friday in Cary, N.C., where she had lived since her retirement in 2019, her daughter Tiffany Olsen told The Associated Press on Monday. The Kentucky native obtained her bachelor’s degree from Berea College in 1968 before studying law at Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., and founding the Tennessee-based advocacy group the Coal Employment Project, in 1977.

Hall became interested in women pursuing mining careers after learning that a Tennessee mining company was refusing to even let women tour its mine – much less work there, according to a 1979 profile in The New York Times.

Before Hall came on the scene, there were virtually no women in coal mining, said Davitt McAteer, who was assistant secretary for the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2000.

There was a long-standing myth among miners that to go into a mine with a woman was bad luck, said McAteer. The legend was that the mine is a woman, and to bring another woman underground would make the mine jealous, he said.

The Coal Employment Project pressured mining companies across the U.S. to hire women by filing anti-discrimination lawsuits. McAteer said Hall had a simple, effective argument that coal companies couldn't deny.

“Her push was always, ‘Mining is where the jobs are and women need to make money just as men do.' She would say, ‘We need the money because we have babies and we’ve got families, too,'" McAteer said.

Hall told the Times in 1979 that if women had 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.”

“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” she told the newspaper. “But so is housework and so is working in sewing factories for minimum wages.”

Within a little more than a year, the Coal Employment Project filed a lawsuit charging 153 coal companies with gender bias in hiring. By December 1978, a settlement was reached with Consolidation Coal Company to pay $370,000 to 70 women who were denied jobs and to hire one woman for every four men.

As a result, U.S. coal companies had hired 830 women miners by late 1978, according to a history of the organization compiled by Hall. By the mid-1980s, that number had increased to over 4,000.

Kipp Dawson, a former coal miner in Pennsylvania and a friend of Hall, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the organization did more than just help women like her get mining jobs. The Coal Employment Project advocated for paid parental leave for miners, an effort that contributed to the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The organization also hosted trainings, annual conferences and support groups for female miners.

“We got taken more seriously because it wasn’t just the voice of a single woman,” Dawson told the newspaper. “She was our mother."

Hall led the Coal Employment Project from 1977 to 1988. In 2001, she was appointed as an administrative appeals judge for the U.S. Department of Labor Benefits Review Board, where she streamlined the process of issuing decisions on appeals of worker’s compensation claims and black lung benefits to ensure injured miners received fair and timely reviews.

Retired journalist and financial professional Jim Branscome, who maintained a close friendship with Hall decades after they were freshmen debate partners at Berea College, said she and Coal Employment Project were so successful because “they caught a trend of women who were fed up with a world where a woman could only hope to be a typist in a coal company office or a clerk in the company store.”

It’s notable, he said, that Hall’s first funding came from a small grant from feminist activist Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Foundation for Women. One of her first awards came from Ms. Magazine. Branscome described her as “tougher than John Henry’s steel driving tools — totally fearless."

“The coal companies were hit with forces they had never faced before, and fancy law firms were defeated by an attorney from a very small law school who had a force of coal-mining women behind her,” he said.

In a statement Monday, United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts called Hall a “remarkable woman” and a “fearless advocate who revolutionized the coal mining industry for women.”

“As we remember her incredible contributions, we reflect on the words of Mother Jones: ‘Whatever your fight, don’t be ladylike,'" Roberts said. “Betty Jean Hall embodied this spirit, breaking barriers and paving the way for countless women in the mining industry.”

Hall is survived by Olsen and her husband Kevin Olsen, her son, Timothy Burke, two grandchildren and a sister, Janet Smith.