‘She was fearless’: Ky. native who fought to open coal mining jobs to women has died

Betty Jean Hall, 78, a Kentucky-born attorney who fought to make coal mining jobs available to women and went on to serve as an administrative judge overseeing the government’s benefits review process for injured workers, died Friday.

Hall has been described on the website of her alma mater, Berea College, as “a tireless advocate for women’s rights, occupational health and safety, and social justice in Appalachia.”

During her retirement, she lived in Cary, N.C.

Hall was the founder of the Coal Employment Project, an advocacy group based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that not only fought legal battles to get women into the mines but also set up a nationwide support network to help them once they got there.

The organization hosted training programs and annual conferences attended by women from across the country and sometimes from abroad, said Kipp Dawson, a social justice advocate and friend of Hall who worked as a coal miner in Pennsylvania for 13 years.

She said the annual sessions the Coal Employment Project hosted allowed women miners — and some men who attended as well — to work through important issues.

The Coal Employment Project presented research on topics such as the effect of pregnancy on female miners and the need for paid parental leave, which paved the way for the Family and Medical Leave Act, Dawson said.

“We got taken more seriously because it wasn’t just the voice of a single woman,” Dawson said. “She was our mother. Without her, we wouldn’t have had the organization ... that has done so much.”

CEP, as the group was known, also set up support groups for female miners in many states, said Marat Moore, a longtime Coal Employment Project member and author of “Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work.”

“The older I get, the more I realize how completely unique, innovative and incredible the work Betty Jean did” was, Moore said. “It was a model of grassroots organizing.”

Hall told the New York Times in 1979 that she grew interested in women in mining after learning about a Tennessee coal mining company that refused to let a woman even go on a tour of a mine.

At the time, there was a superstitious attitude toward women in mining, much like that of sailors of long ago — “It’s like being the first woman on a ship. Nobody wants you on their crew,” Hall told the Times.

“It occurred to me that even though I had grown up in Kentucky, I didn’t know a single woman miner,” Hall told the newspaper.

Through anti-discrimination lawsuits and grassroots advocacy, Hall was able to pressure coal mining companies around the country to begin hiring women.

“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” Hall told the New York Times. “But so is housework 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.”

Jim Branscome, a lifelong friend of Hall who now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, said that at that time, “the only jobs that women were being offered in the coal industry were in the office with a typewriter.”

Branscome said he thinks the feminist movement and Hall’s upbringing in a region dependent on mining coalesced to lead her to take action.

When Hall was contacted by a law group in East Tennessee about the lack of opportunities for women in mining, he said “she decided to do something about it.”

“She was just a part of a generation of women that decided, ‘We ain’t gonna take this no more,’” he said.

“There was a time when coal companies were much admired,” Branscome said. “The coal industry was just kind of shocked that someone was coming after them with these lawsuits.”

And, he said, “they had the power of the federal government and the courts behind them. That was new.”

Though the ranks of female miners were on the rise in the 1970s, later media reports indicate that their numbers were dwindling by the mid- to late 1980s, as coal companies cut jobs.

Hall told the Herald-Leader in 1986 that women had been particularly hard-hit, because they were “the last hired and the first fired.”

Though there are few women mining today, Moore said she hopes Hall’s legacy of women organizing is something that will continue.

“It was one of the greatest gifts of my life,” she said.

Dawson said Hall helped women break barriers, allowing them to choose career paths previously unavailable to them and giving them the tools to become leaders in their field.

And in recent years, she said Hall had been working to help preserve the history of how she did it for future generations.

She laughed quietly as she remembered one particular story of Hall’s dedication to preserving records of the Coal Employment Project’s work.

For years, Dawson said, the group put out a monthly newsletter, and each edition included submissions from around the country and one longer article telling the story of a woman coal miner. The publication was mimeographed on 8-by-14 paper, Dawson said, and stapled together in Hall’s office.

“That particular format was hard to digitize,” she said.

So years later, Hall retyped each newsletter herself so the articles could be preserved in digital format.

“She knew how important our stories were,” Dawson said.

Moore said her story would certainly not have been the same without Hall.

“She gave us opportunities to have a life that was bigger and more interesting,” Moore said. “She was tiny. A very small person, but I felt like one of the biggest oaks in our forest fell.”

Hall was a native of Perry County who grew up attending Buckhorn School. She transferred to the Berea College Foundation School, a high school operated by the college at that time, when her father became head of the college’s woodworking program, according to an obituary provided by Branscome.

She graduated from Berea College in 1968. In 1976, she graduated from the Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., a school focused on public interest law and social justice.

The following year, she founded the Coal Employment Project.

Over the years, Hall’s work was recognized by a number of organizations, including Ms. magazine, which named her a “Woman to Watch in the 80s,” and by the National Women’s Health Network, which named her Health Advocate of the Year in 1980, according to a brief biography on the Berea College website .

In 2001, several years after the Coal Employment Project had stopped operating, Hall was appointed administrative appeals judge for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Benefits Review Board.

“Under her leadership, the board streamlined the benefits review process, ensuring coal miners with black lung disease and other workers injured in their occupations received fair and timely reviews of their compensation applications,” her biography on the Berea College website states.

She served until 2019, when she retired from the position as chief administrative appeals judge.

Branscome said he first met Hall as a freshman at Berea College, and their friendship lasted 60 years.

He said they competed on the debate team together, worked together at the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington, D.C., after college and never lost touch as their careers led them to different places.

“Betty Jean’s the kind of friend that’s always there,” he said. “During all of life’s ups and downs.”

Both on the debate team and in standing up to coal companies, Branscome said, “she was fearless.”

In recent years, Branscome said, he and Hall worked together as part of a group looking at ways to help Berea College recruit more students from the mountains.

Last year, Hall was awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the college.

A scholarship fund in her name has been set up at Berea College, and it will benefit “students from the most economically distressed counties in Appalachia, which are mostly the coalfields,” her obituary stated.

“Among all her accomplishments, she is proudest of her twins, Tim and Tiffany, and her two grandchildren, Athena and Blake,” her Berea College biography says.

Her family resides in Cary, North Carolina, according to the obituary.

“My mother loved Eastern Kentucky and worked very, very hard to give back to her homeland,” her daughter Tiffany Olsen said in a message.

Memorial services are planned for Oct. 5 in Berea, she said.