Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.

Native peoples throughout the globe are facing extinction due to the greed of mining and oil companies. As the energy crisis intensifies, their plight sounds the alarm to all those concerned about the prospect of global warming, genocide, and eco-disasters. Resource Rebels traces the development of multiracial, transnational movements in the US, Asia, Africa and Latin America that are countering resource extraction and providing direction for environmentalists and anticapitalists alike. Book jacket.