Pit brow women
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Pit brow women or pit brow lasses were female surface labourers at British collieries. They worked at the coal screens on the pit bank at the shaft top until the 1960s. Their job was to pick stones fr
Pit brow lass from Wigan on the Lancashire Coalfield.
A photo of pit girls in South Wales, from the late Victorian period
Bal maiden
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A bal maiden, from the Cornish language bal, a mine, and the English "maiden", a young or unmarried woman, was a female manual labourer working in the mining industries of Cornwall and western Devon,
Pit brow women
…Victorian sensibilities were outraged by women working at pits and dressing in trousers was considered unfeminine and degenerate by society. Bal maiden - women who worked the Cornish tin mines Victorian dress reform…
Bal maidens in traditional protective clothing, 1890
Earthworks near Minions left by tin-streaming (gathering clusters of ore from stream and river beds), the earliest form of mining in Cornwall
Bal maidens with traditional tools and protective clothing spalling ore, 1858
Miners and bal maidens with typical equipment and protective clothing at Dolcoath, 1890