The Research

Carol Stephenson contacted UF activists Edna Lee Lewis, Bev Brown, Betty McCloud, and Milly Ghetto during a British Council funded research project initiated by Northumbria University in 2005. By this time, coal mining had ended in Cape Breton. Geological faults at Phalen precipitated closure before the end of 1999 and, no buyers being found, Prince closed in November 2001.Footnote ⁸ The social consequences were exacerbated by the closure of Sydney steelworks in 2001.Footnote ⁹ Ethnographic research by Carol Stephenson and Dave Wray completed in Cape Breton in 2005 and 2006 intended to compare the post-mining economic, social, and cultural environment there with Northeast England.Footnote ¹⁰ The contextual information for this article derives from those visits, from related informal conversations and interviews, and from a range of published sources.Footnote ¹¹ A number of semi-structured interviews were undertaken in Cape Breton by Wray and Stephenson with a local priest, teachers, politicians, union leaders, ex-miners, and finally the small group of UF woman whose stories are the focus of this paper. In these initial interviews, the UF campaign was mentioned only incidentally by the women with reference to the realization of the fears that had informed campaigners regarding impoverishment, ill-health, and the fracturing of traditional social relationships.

Informal email communication between Carol Stephenson and Edna Lee Lewis brought into focus Edna's desire to tell the UF story. A further three telephone interviews were recorded with Edna, Betty McCloud, and Bev Brown in 2012. During these long-distance interviews the significance of the photographs in the UF campaign emerged. Edna sent copies of forty-nine photographs, and in a 2018 telephone interview, offered a commentary regarding her current reading of the images. Considering each photograph in turn Edna spoke about the men portrayed with reference to the experience after mine closures, which frequently referred to economic migration, depression, alcoholism, and the collapse of relationships and marriages. This highlighted the weight of meaning that the images carried and their role in the UF campaign. Subsequently, Stephenson undertook two further long-distance interviews with Bev Brown and Betty McCloud. These two women did not have copies of the photographs as reference points and here the photographs became much more of a prompt for a general discussion about how they were used in the UF campaign, and the meanings attached to their use.

The interview material is complicated by retrospective understanding, tricks of personal memory, accepted collective narratives consolidated over time, and the personal trajectories of the women interviewed and the men photographed. The material must be understood with reference to the problems of oral history accounts in general.Footnote ¹² For example, there are ethical issues regarding the naming of individuals currently living or living in the remembered past. Opinions are associated with the real names of respondents with the understanding that narratives/facts may be contested and disputed.

There is unevenness of emphasis in our interview material, which distorts the account of the order of events and the personnel present in meetings. Edna's commentary on the photographs is retrospective and our own reading of the images is as outsiders. Documentary research was undertaken to provide a clearer timeline of activism, the range of meetings, and the substantive arguments pursued in the UF campaign. Transcripts of committee and legislative meetings, contemporary newspaper reports, and local press opinion pieces offered information that contextualize the women's accounts of the response to the closure settlement. The transcript of the Provincial Assembly committee meeting in May 1999, when Edna and Bev reported the outcome of their first visit to Ottawa, includes a detailed digressive interjection by the two women about the photographs. This account encouraged our view that the meaning of the photographs to the women was worthy of attention in ways that went beyond their simple illustrative value.Footnote ¹³

Background

The Prince and Phalen mines were situated in North Sydney and New Waterford on the northeastern coast of Cape Breton. These areas were colonized between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, from an industrializing and unsettled Europe, predominantly from Scotland by peoples traumatized by the clearances of the Highlands and islands.Footnote ¹⁴ The immigrants forged communities based on farming, fishing, and logging. Coal mining began in 1720, becoming the dominant occupation by the early twentieth century. Folk memories of displacement, mining heritage, industrial conflict, and collective strength in adversity, remain culturally present in folk music and in the adoption of the distinctive Cape Breton tartan.Footnote ¹⁵ Stephenson met Edna Lee Lewis and Milly Ghetto in 2005, at the annual Davis Day event that commemorates the killing of miner William Davis by police during an industrial dispute in 1925. This troubled history continues to distinguish Cape Breton as distinct from mainland Canada.

Intergenerational memory as well as first-hand experience of industrial decline informed the UF campaign around the mine closure settlement. The traumatic ghosts of forced migration, mining disasters, and industrial class conflict were ever-present in the campaign.Footnote ¹⁶ It was understood that the absence of adequate economic regional investment and personal support, mine closures would precipitate another unwanted wave of outward migration:

Following the mine closures, the women's fears were all too fully realized as men were forced to migrate for work, community cohesion was fractured, people experienced multiple deprivation, and families were broken.Footnote ¹⁹

The campaign focus in 1999 included the need to maintain an employment market in Cape Breton. The UF women had a strong commitment to maintaining Cape Breton as a viable place to live and work. Loyalty to place and people was associated with the experience and memory of the friendliness and trust among mining people. Nevertheless, as in mining regions elsewhere, the women in Cape Breton had an ambiguous relationship with the industry. It was the source of their security and identity but extremely dangerous for the men.Footnote ²⁰

The UF women repeatedly referred to the hazards of mining as a principal concern about the inadequacies of the closure settlement:

Whilst BevFootnote ²² suggested that it was “not for me to make a judgement” about men's relationship to the dangers of mining, Edna later admitted:

Awareness of the dangers of mining bound women to the cause of the men in ways that are often not fully understood by those who have not experienced mining life. The women's ambiguity about mining was complicated by their dependence on work that was exclusively male and characterized by gender inequality. Nonetheless, a general feeling of regard for men as miners overrode ambiguity whilst the cohesion of community life only made sense with reference to the work of the men in the mines.

The community-based activism of the women reflected their social position in family and neighborhood life. Such positioning implicitly assumed female and family dependence upon men and mining. Community and industry were differently gendered, and their interests were inscribed within different organizations, but these were inextricably interwoven, and not emotionally separate for the women.

The miners’ union, US-based UMWA, stood apart from the concerns of the women. Local UMWA activists, and the miners themselves were not passive in the face of the immanent closures. However, UMWA represented their work-based interests in well-defined ways. Inevitably, UF and UMWA, particularly in the person of the local union representative Steve Drake, increasingly diverged in their approach to the prospect of mine closures:

The women's determination to take their case directly to Ottawa, the center of political decision-making, exposed the limits of the responsibility of the mining unions whilst simultaneously intruding into union territory.Footnote ²⁶

Women who were interviewed claimed that when they had made some headway in their campaign, the union representative, Steve Drake, intervened to subvert their achievement:

Relationships between UF and UMWA inevitably soured and, according to the women interviewed, confidence in union representatives was lost. The situation came to a head in January 2000, when the Prince miners, frustrated with the inaction of the union, staged an unofficial walk out in support of some of their colleagues who had staged an underground sit-in. The women claimed that the miners had not been supported by their union.Footnote ²⁹ The fracture between UMWA and UF was now complete:

The women believed that the activist miners were disempowered and shamed by their union. Perceptions of union failure meant that the UF, built through informal neighborhood networking, became the voice of opposition, and hope for a better outcome:

Driven by their relational commitment to the miners, the women came to carry the whole weight of expectation for an improved outcome:

Edna and Bev, as co-chairs of UF, were aware of the enormity of the trust placed in them when they were tasked with taking the miners’ case to government ministers in Ottawa and it heightened the emotional pressure they experienced. This was not necessarily wholly negative as it fed their energy and inspired creativity:

The first visit to Ottawa was made in late April 1999. The decision to take photographs to support their case was part of this UF's creative drive, unconstrained by bureaucracy or the formalities characteristic of industrial relations settings. The women felt free to move beyond economic and financial discourses, to refer to human values using tools that were expressive and meaningful in those terms.

Nevertheless, they perceived the photographs to be supportive of the objective case that they wanted to make based on data about the health of miners that they had collected:

The photographs were meant as data, to visually demonstrate the physical condition of miners. In presenting what they believed to be objective information; Edna suggested repeatedly that the women hoped to “shame” the decision-makers into amending the settlement. In this regard the information already went beyond the purely factual: both the survey data and the photographs were perceived by the women to carry a value-based, moral charge. The images were intended to “put the human face” on hard numerical facts, because, as Bev said, ‘A picture paints a thousand words.’Footnote ³⁷ In use then, they shifted the meaning of the information toward the human and the personal and implicitly bore the weight of the relationship of the women to the men as miners. This impacted significantly upon the negotiations with politicians.

The Photographs

The five UF women who took the photographs trespassed onto colliery territory, normally out of bounds to women. Witnessing the collective condition of the men emerging from the mine shocked them, strengthening their resolve:

Taking the photographs provided an opportunity for further discussion with the men:

This was a key moment in the campaign, consolidating the women's emotional commitment to the men, emphasizing their desire to portray the humanity of miners, and reinforcing the trust between the miners and UF.

At the end of the twentieth century, analogue cameras were commonly owned and used, but not usually in everyday life, being reserved rather for recording special occasions. Beyond professional and serious amateur photography, the use of cameras was both circumspect and circumscribed. Taking photographs represented a special and considered moment in the women's campaign, requiring planning, preparation, and decision-making as well as some photographic competence. Two of the cameras taken by the women to the pit yard were “cheap disposables.” Edna reported that one of them didn't work. The photographs that were eventually used were mainly taken by Doreen Bishop with an SLR camera requiring some photographic skill to operate effectively. Photographic film available mainly in reels of twenty-four or thirty-six images, limited the margin of error and the film then had to be developed commercially. Accordingly, there was no artifice involved in the production of the prints and the images were not subject to manipulation.

(1) Miners leaving Phalen mine April 1999.

(2) “What we wanted to do was …show them the human face of mining” (Betty 2012)

(3) “These photos did have an impact because you know they were not just hearing voices come out – they were seeing people they were making decisions about”. (Edna 2012)

(4) “They were choc-full of coaldust” (Bev, 1999)

(5) “I see the grime, the dust and the dirt on their face and on their clothing. I can only visualise what is inside their body and their lungs” (Edna 2018)

(6) “Despite what I said, there are miners who loved jobs they loved being in a coal mine” (Edna 2012)

(7) “These were men in their 40s, 50s and 60s…these are the people you are destroying….we were trying to put a face on it” (Bev 2012)

(8) “We took the pictures, five of us and they were beautiful. They were close ups, they had coal dust you could see the water on their clothes” (Bev, 1999)

(9) “Mining ages people. We were able to say look at these people they are young, but they look old. 20 years down a coalmine is like 40 in any other work”. (Bev 2012)

(10) “When we grew up, we saw these men coming home from work every day and so there was love for them” (Edna 2012).

(11) “I said ‘this is a man…he is short two years from a pension’. He was full of coal dust. I said he ‘look he is soaked to the bone’……he has been down there for 7-8 hours” (Bev 1999)

These portrait photographs show men of different ages, in groups, pairs, or alone, unwashed and in their work clothes. Some miners actively posed for the camera, some appear apprehensive, but there is no sign of resistance to the women. The men were aware of UF and increasingly believed the women to be their last hope for an improved settlement. The photographs are therefore a unique expression of the inter-subjective relationship between the men and women and of the commonality of their interests. It would not have been possible for a professional photographer, whose access depended on formal processes of consent, to take such a set of images, and it is questionable that the men would have acquiesced to being photographed under such circumstances. By taking these photographs and presenting them in the public domain of the campaign, the women were subverting the “otherness” attached to most mining images and were claiming a center stage for their own concerns.Footnote ⁴⁰ These images enabled the subjective situation of the men to be revealed through the particularity of their relationship with the women. The camera was an objective tool, but in their photography, the women were doing more than “capturing” an objective moment. The resulting images have meaning beyond what is written on the surface.

The focus of the photographs is primarily upon the men's faces. As “the prime symbol of the self” faces represent a deep humanity.Footnote ⁴¹ Portraits stimulate the observer to identify with the image-as-person. In 2018, Edna commented on the men's eyes, seeing in one water that might be tears, and in others anxiety. Facial expressions provoke empathetic responses and as such solicit sympathetic understanding. In Cape Breton, this focus acted as a counter to financial calculations that objectified the men and reduced them to numbers. Throughout their campaign, the women sought to shift the terms of consideration toward the consequences of the closure settlement for living people. Photographs were a means to achieve this. The ageing impact of mining was a key trope in the campaign narrative:

The focus was upon the plight of younger miners, but the photographs were of miners young and old, stressing both their common condition and their otherness from the women photographers and from the political decision-makers. The point was to highlight the special case for medical benefits:

The women saw “Beautiful men”Footnote ⁴⁴ in the miners’ images, understanding the quality of personhood that underpinned the sacrifices of miners to provide for their families. This perception of beauty was inspired by the relationship of the women to the living miners, rather than any “objective” aesthetic characteristic of the photograph and the women treated the photographs with the care that they believed was worthy of their human quality.

The organization of the prints into an album bound in Nova Scotia tartan emphasized the significance of mining to Cape Breton identity. It also highlighted the familiarity of mining relationships by drawing on the conventions of the family album. This positioned the photographs within a domestic tradition of family photography, which historically has been largely curated by women.Footnote ⁴⁵ The album format emphasized personal interconnectedness and the “specialness” of a community of belonging in which mining was central. Bev and Edna believed that in presenting their album, as a mother might open a family album for friends, they would connect personally with decision-makers, eliciting recognition and sympathy based on a shared understanding of familial love. This family allusion, underpinned by love, was deeply felt:

Feelings of love in mining life, especially at moments of threat, encourage women to override the realities of gender inequality in favor of the broader class solidarities needed to deal with the crisis. Ironically, in the process, the traditional condition of women, dependent on the male mining wage, is reconfirmed, curtailing the potential of female activism to challenge gender inequalities.Footnote ⁴⁷ This apparent contradiction informed the way in which Edna and Bev presented themselves and used their photographs in the context of their campaign negotiations.

Ottawa Negotiations

When Edna and Bev travelled to Ottawa in April 1999, to engage formally in political negotiation, they entered a traditionally masculine environment. However, they were granted special access to this environment specifically as female campaigners. They were not offered opportunities to plead their case as representatives of the men—that was the job of the union—but rather as dependents of the men, and principally as miners’ wives. These were the terms in which “doors were opened.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The sincere, sympathetic response of male decision-makers to the women's case was implicitly gendered and outside the hard economic priorities of politicians that restricted scope for concessions. Consequently, as Bev concluded, “A lot of political people claimed to be supportive but were not.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Edna and Bev were alert to the fact that it was as “authentic” female representatives that they gained a hearing and believed that they were more likely to be taken seriously by presenting themselves as “respectable married women.”

Bev's comments betray self-consciousness in playing down political intentions and reacting to external views of “miners’ wives” that implied the need for role-playing. Such role playing in the search for legitimacy re-inscribes women in traditional gendered subject positions, constraining their agency to the arenas of family and community in the process.Footnote ⁵¹ The need to respond to traditional expectations of mining femininity and its family-community location created tension with the women's desire to be accepted as serious actors in the industrial- political sphere. Edna and Bev did not wish to disturb traditional gender roles but were engaged in a struggle in which their focus was the industrial relations concern of the miners.

They were inadvertently invading union territory, whilst transgressing the gendered boundaries inscribed in female subject positions. Their self-presentation as “only miners’ wives” was in tension with their claim to factually represent the case of men with whom they had dependent, emotional, relationships. Their self-presentation granted them access to political brokers, while simultaneously obstructing their efforts to have their case heard impartially. It distracted from the validity of their data-based evidence in favor of an emphasis on their personal-emotional investment in the men. In this context, the emotional weight within the photographs obscured their informational value.

What began as a process of humanizing the evidence of the impact of mining on the male body, evolved into a process of humanizing the photographic prints. Carrying a weight of expectations from “back home” and performing according to perceived expectations of their gender position, the photograph album transformed into an expression of the power of the womens feelings for the men. The photographs began to substitute for the absent miners. The materiality of the album that could be presented, touched, passed around, studied, and explained abetted this substitution process in which the women sought to use the images to provoke shame and sympathy in decision-makers.

In the Ottawa meeting, Edna, and Bev's attempt to “put a human face” on their evidence by “laying out the album on the table,” and introducing individual miners animated their own deeply held emotions. When they encountered resistance, they felt exposed and vulnerable and their efforts to use the photographs as hard evidence were confounded. Once their emotions were triggered, the women no longer faced decision-makers as equals, but as supplicants. Any shame that politicians and bureaucrats might have felt about the impact of their economic decisions was thereby deflected by embarrassed and antagonistic responses to emotion-laden material that did not conform to the discursive conventions of formalized procedures of negotiation.

Organizational decisions-making conventions are designed to facilitate rational and orderly discussion and consequently exclude emotional considerations. The women who were already defined in terms of their affective relationship with the miners were disadvantaged by these conventions. The introduction of the portrait album disturbed the whole edifice of rational decision-making:

Even when presented as objective evidence, the portraits stirred human recognition. However, the terms of the affective response depend upon the subject position of the viewer. Despite their trust in the power of human images, the UF women's response to the men's’ faces did not necessarily correspond with the understanding of the politicians asked to consider them. Although some negotiators seemed moved by the images, their concern failed to give the women any greater purchase. Edna claimed that she perceived sympathy among some of those present, singling out the advisor to the finance minister:

Significantly, Edna is not suggesting that the advisor was convinced by their arguments and evidence, but rather “touched” by their sentiment. His sympathy encouraged Edna and Bev to believe that they might show their photograph album in their meeting with the prime minister, Jean Chrétien. However, their senator, who had facilitated the meeting, discouraged the use of the photographs:

The senator believed he was “helping” them to be taken more seriously. Edna and Bev appreciated his efforts and did not object to his keeping the album. Yet he removed the medium that most forcefully symbolized the terms of the women's commitment to the men and their determination to keep the men at the center of their discussions. Consequently, they were forced not only to continue to perform as traditional miners’ wives, but also to subdue the power of their emotions and accommodate their approach to procedures in which the connotations of being a miner's wife devalued their intervention.

The legitimacy of the women's presence as miners’ wives, which would have afforded some emotional leeway, was contradicted by Edna and Bev's insistence that they were primarily representing the miners whose absent presence was manifest in the photographs. The photographs were intended to give the men a “place at the table” and the materiality of the prints substituted for the material presence of the men. Later Edna suggested that they were not fully conscious of what they were doing:

The co-operation of the miners in the efforts of UF to pursue their case, exemplified in their willingness to allow the women to take their photographs, informed the women's belief in the legitimacy of their right to negotiate on behalf of the men. The photographs expressed this claim to legitimacy, but this was not acknowledged by politicians. Legitimacy was confined to the unions. Encountering the UF women partially, as representatives only of family and community, displaced the photographs and consigned them entirely to the domestic, relational arena.

Understanding the Photographs

Women have used photography as an expressive medium since its inception. However, professional, and serious amateur, photography, using expensive equipment, has been historically male dominated. Women have been more circumscribed in their subject matter, limited by gender mores and the realities of female domestic responsibilities.Footnote ⁵⁷ They have had more photographic agency in the domestic sphere using less expensive or technically complex cameras. The disposable cameras brought to the colliery yard by two of the UF women are a case in point.

The gendered fault lines in photography are characterized particularly by a disjuncture between the conventions of professional and amateur, public, and private (domestic) photography that includes different technical expectations. Although any claim that photography can unproblematically capture “reality” has been comprehensively challenged, the common-sense supposition is that the camera can “bear witness” to real things, places, and events. Documentary photography tends to emphasize the “otherness” and separation of the photographer from the subject even when participant in the situation observed.Footnote ⁵⁸ Not all public photography is “documentary,” but standards of objectivity or rules of interpretation that account for subjectivities are applicable to all images that are used in truth claims. Such standards and rules are irrelevant in domestic photography wherein the subjectivity of the photographer and relationships between photographer and photographed are assumed and may be the primary motivation. The use and display of photographs reinforces the distinction between the public document and the domestic image. Professional photography operates as both “art” and “information” and is available for critical interpretation. Domestic photography is held within families and communities, displayed within the home and local institutions where critical reading seems inappropriate.

The UF women's photographs demonstrate technical competence, and the subject matter aligns with public documentary traditions in which industrial images are placed. Objectively, they simply show miners in their work clothes. The images lack names, date, place, or political context. When this information is provided, they become historical documents recording an important moment in the history of Cape Breton coal mining and are valuable in these terms. Yet the photographs were produced within the domestic photography tradition. This is particularly evident in the use of the album and in the women's belief that qualities of love and beauty are self-evident in the images. The meaning of the campaign photographs derives from the women's relationship to the men rather than to the photographs themselves, and the volatility of the images as presented in political/bureaucratic negotiations resides in the transgression of the gendered fault lines associated with the division between public and domestic in the history of analogue photography.

In political activism, photographs used to record events and to communicate issues have been mainly produced and mobilized within the masculine inflected conventions of “public” and “professional” documentary photography. For example, huge numbers of photographs were taken by “participant observers” during the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, some have become iconic images directly communicating the nature of that dispute.Footnote ⁵⁹ The photographs taken by the UF women were not intended as documents in this sense but as integral evidence in support of their campaign. This is unusual in the history of politically informed photography, and the political negotiators in Ottawa would have had no reference points from which to interpret the significance of the images.

Domestic photography has been used transgressively in the public domain, notably for example, by the Mothers of the Missing in Argentina.Footnote ⁶⁰ Here, photographs produced in the domestic sphere representing affective familial relationships were used to disrupt the public silence surrounding missing people. As public documents, those domestic photographs, which would otherwise have remained within the arena of private grief, powerfully disrupted the public-domestic, political-personal divide. The UF photographs were disruptive in a different way, defying easy classification: They were industrial and familial, political and personal, devised within a domestic tradition but produced and deployed as public documents.

The camera can be a democratizing tool for disadvantaged people. bell hooks points to the curation of photographs in the homes of Black people wherein the Black gaze and private values run counter to the public, colonial gaze on Blackness dominating conditions of racial segregation.Footnote ⁶¹ In Cape Breton, the women's photographs operate in a similar vein in relation to class but go further by taking the images into the public-political arena. Their photographs of men leaving work in a dying industry, which had shaped the existence of a community for over two centuries, and their inclusion in the familial space of an album, can be understood as both an act of evidencing and of self-definition, asserting an alternative vision of what is valuable to that contained within the narratives of those who held decision-making power over miners and their families. However, it was ultimately a vision of the powerless that, when it touched the sympathies of decision-makers, was experienced at the least as disruptive and at the worst threatening. Unsurprisingly, the UF campaign won only a minor concession to the terms of the settlement.Footnote ⁶²