Join us for a discussion with Marcia Biederman, and uncover an unfairly forgotten hero of Pennsylvania coal miners, Dr. Elizabeth Hayes.
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In the last months of World War II, the nation’s attention turned to a home front battle led by a woman. She was Elizabeth O. Hayes, MD, doctor for a coal company that owned the town of Force, PA, where sewage contaminated the drinking water. Corrupt managers dismissed the public-health threat and refused to fix the problem.
When Hayes resigned to protest intolerable living conditions, 350 miners went on strike in support of her, and a media storm erupted. Reporters flocked to the small mining town to champion Dr. Hayes’ cause. Slim, blonde, and 33, “Dr. Betty” became the heroine of an environmental drama that captivated the nation, complete with mustache-twirling villains, surprises, setbacks, and a mostly happy ending.
News outlets ranging from Business Week to the Daily Worker applauded her guts. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her. Soldiers followed her progress in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, flooding her with fan mail. A Philadelphia newspaper recommended Dr. Betty’s prescription to others: “Rx: Get Good and Angry.” President Harry S. Truman referred her grievances to his justice department, which handed her a victory.
Purchase A Mighty Force now. The only book, popular or academic, written about Hayes. Readers interested in feminism, the environment, corporate accountability, and the World War II home front will be excited to discover this engaging, untold episode in women’s history. Author Marcia Biederman draws on news reports, interviews with descendants, correspondence, union files, court records, an observer’s scrapbook, mining company data, and a journalist’s oral history to create the first modern telling of Dr. Betty and her relentless battle for public health.
Marcia Biederman has contributed more than 150 articles to the New York Times, writing about everything from ice dancing to automobile wheel repair. She was a staff reporter for Crain’s New York Business and an editor for Chain Store Age. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, the New York Observer, and Newsday. She is the author of several books including Popovers and Candlelight: Patricia Murphy and The Rise and Fall of a Restaurant Empire, published by SUNY Press in 2018, and Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed Reading Worked, published by Chicago Review Press in 2019.