female miners

[quattro]

Further to the question below on talented women and not wanting to appear chauvanistic why are'nt there any female miners . Women want equal status in other fields like the lpice and fire services but they never seem to push too hard for the less glamourous jobs like rubbish collection or mining .I'm sure I read somewhere that women are prohibited by law to work in coal mine is this true?

[TommyC]

Equal rights, opportunities and treatment won't give women equal biceps..!! It's silly to pretend that all working women could simply switch into all manual-labour jobs at a stroke... Of course they couldn't, because they just aren't physically built for a lot of it - evne with intensive training. My wife and her sister have BOTH suffered extremely large and dangerous hernias in the last few years, simply through being a little over-ambitious with the shopping bags, car-boot-sales and furniture re-organising, and I for one wouldn't want thousands of silly women clamouring to take over mining, building-site and foundry-working jobs, and ending up seriously injured in hospital as a result.

[woofgang]

On Sunday's Antiques roadshow from wigan, there was a paiting depicting female mineworkers so there with bells on