A new square has been named in honour of women who worked in Shropshire coalfields, reports BBC News:
The area in Telford has become Betty Harris Square, after her experiences "as a 'pit girl' became one of the most powerful accounts of women's working lives during Britain's industrial past", the council said.
It added while she was not from Telford, her story represented thousands, many whose names were unknown, who worked in east Shropshire coalfields.
More than 1,000 people voted for the name after residents were invited to vote from a shortlist of influential women connected to the area's history.
This gives me the excuse to quote from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman:
The Coal Mines Act went through with little trouble except for a struggle to keep pit-brow lasses their right to work. Masterman had made enquiries into the question when he had been to Lancashire ... and had also received a deputation of the lasses themselves, sturdy, strapping girls obviously in far better health than the majority of factory or shop girls; and was determined they should not go.
He laid down the principle: that women should not be forbidden any type of work unless it was proved to be (1) unhealthy, (2) in a situation dangerous to morals, (3) of a degrading and degraded character, and that a Parliament in which women were not represented should be chary of excluding them from any work they wished to do.
I knew I had used that quote on here before and, I thought, quite recently. When I searched for it, it turns out to be eight years ago. Who knows where the time goes?
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