CHARLESTON, West Virginia – Betty Jean Hall, an Appalachian lawyer and federal administrative judge who paved the way for women into the coal mining industry, has died. She was 78.

Hall died Friday in Cary, North Carolina, where she had lived since retiring in 2019, her daughter Tiffany Olsen told the Associated Press on Monday. The Kentuckian native earned her bachelor’s degree from Berea College in 1968 before studying law at the Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., and founding the Tennessee-based advocacy group Coal Employment Project in 1977.

Hall became interested in women pursuing careers in mining after learning that a mining company in Tennessee did not even allow women to tour its mine—let alone work there, according to a 1979 New York Times profile.

Before Hall’s appearance, there were virtually no women in coal mining, says Davitt McAteer, deputy secretary of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2000.

There is a long-standing myth among miners that going into a mine with a woman is bad luck, McAteer said. The legend said the mine was a woman and bringing another woman underground would make the mine jealous, he said.

The Coal Employment Project pressured mining companies across the U.S. to hire women by filing anti-discrimination lawsuits. McAteer said Hall had a simple, effective argument that the coal companies couldn’t dispute.

“Her belief was always, ‘There are jobs in mining and women need to earn money just like men.’ She always said, ‘We need the money because we have children and families,'” McAteer said.

Hall told the Times in 1979 that if women had the choice between working in a factory for $6,000 a year or mining coal for $60 or more a day, “they would go into the mines.”

“Sure, coal mining is hard work,” she told the newspaper. “But so is housework and working in sewing factories for minimum wage.”

Within a little over a year, the Coal Employment Project filed a lawsuit accusing 153 coal companies of gender discrimination in hiring. In December 1978, it reached an agreement with the Consolidation Coal Company to pay $370,000 to 70 women who were denied employment and to hire one woman for every four men.

As a result, U.S. coal companies hired 830 female miners by the end of 1978, according to a history of the organization compiled by Hall. By the mid-1980s, that number had risen to more than 4,000.

Kipp Dawson, a former coal miner in Pennsylvania and friend of Hall, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the organization did more than just help women like her get jobs in the mining industry. The Coal Employment Project pushed for paid parental leave for miners, an initiative that helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The organization also held trainings, annual conferences and support groups for female miners.

“We were taken more seriously because it wasn’t just one woman’s voice,” Dawson told the newspaper. “She was our mother.”

Hall directed the Coal Employment Project from 1977 to 1988. In 2001, she was appointed administrative appeals judge for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Benefits Review Board, where she streamlined the adjudication process for appeals of workers’ compensation claims and silicosis benefits to ensure that injured miners received fair and timely evaluations.

Retired journalist and finance expert Jim Branscome, who maintained a close friendship with Hall decades after they became freshman debate partners at Berea College, said she and the Coal Employment Project were so successful “because they recognized a trend among women who were fed up with a world in which a woman could only hope to work as a typist in a coal company office or as a salesperson in the company store.”

It was notable, he said, that Hall’s first funding came from a small donation from feminist activist Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Foundation for Women. One of her first awards was from Ms. Magazine. Branscome described her as “tougher than John Henry’s steel drill bits — totally fearless.”

“The coal companies were confronted with forces they had never faced before, and high-profile law firms were defeated by a lawyer from a very small law school who had a bevy of women from the coal mining industry behind her,” he said.

In a statement Monday, Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America International union, called Hall a “remarkable woman” and “a fearless champion of rights who revolutionized coal mining for women.”

“As we remember her incredible contributions, we remember the words of Mother Jones: ‘No matter what you fight, don’t be ladylike,'” Roberts said. “Betty Jean Hall embodied that spirit, breaking barriers and paving the way for countless women in the mining industry.”

Hall leaves behind Olsen and her husband, Kevin Olsen, her son, Timothy Burke, two grandchildren and a sister, Janet Smith.