This image is taken from the 1947 supplement to the Department of the Interior’s publication, A Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, entitled “The Coal Miner and His Family.” This federal investigation explicitly critiques coal-mining communities for their “uncivilized” culture and illiteracy. In talking about the miner’s wife and the “drudgery” and “stultifying monotony” of her job as a housewife, the author makes statements that assume the feelings of the wife, claiming she is “appalled by the nothingness of her surroundings.”
After this depiction of the miner’s wife as isolated in a cultureless, featureless wasteland is a condemnation of her housekeeping, health, hygiene, and nutritional practices. The supplement asserts that “She buys and feeds her family the traditional diet in her part of the country, and that happens to be less scientific than the diet of urban and industrial families,” “Also lacking in the culture of the miner’s wife is a full enough appreciation of health and hygiene,” “She has protested, but has since ceased to care, about the absence of screens on the widows of her house. She regards the flies not as disease carriers but merely as pests that annoy her children,” and “She simply does as her neighbors do – she flings the dirty wash water and slop onto the ground from her back porch.”
The author offers an explanation of these coal town practices: “Many [of the coal miners’ wives], without any conception of better standards or training in homemaking, never try, even where conditions in their favor are the best.” Yet the supplement also points toward the ultimate futility of trying to maintain a home, explaining that “grime hangs like a pall over the camp” and “the incessant dirt, a native blend of coal dust from the tipple, smoke from the railroad, dust from the roads, sand, grime, and acrid fumes from the burning slag heaps permeates and clings tenaciously to the structures and furnishings of houses and to human bodies.”
