The Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of 1950 had built a benefit trust to take care of miners who retired before 1974 - the men who had worked through cave-ins and black lung in an era before federal safety law. By 1987, with coal prices falling and non-union mines undercutting them, Pittston Coal walked away from the agreement that funded those benefits. The company doubled deductibles, cut coverage from 100 percent to 80 percent, and ended care entirely for the pre-1974 retirees. About 1,500 people - retirees, disabled miners, and widows in southwest Virginia - lost their health insurance. Many of them were already paying for cancer treatment, dialysis, oxygen. The bills came out of pocket while the company explained that the recession had made the old contract unaffordable.

When the strike began, supporters started arriving from across the country - from West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, from union halls a thousand miles away. The towns around Castlewood, Virginia tried to put them up, but there were not enough beds. A local recreational park became Camp Solidarity. A small shelter went up with bunk beds inside. The snack bar reopened to feed people. Campers and tents filled the field. At the strike's peak in June 1989, about 2,000 miners were staying at the camp every day, and across the coalfields, around 40,000 workers walked out in sympathy. The camp was not a tactic. It was a community that materialized because one was needed.

The women named themselves after Mary Harris Jones, the white-haired organizer who had walked the coal camps a century earlier. The Daughters of Mother Jones organized housing, cooked the food, raised the money, and held a continuous protest outside Pittston headquarters in Lebanon, Virginia. When company lawyers demanded they identify themselves to the court, they refused - every one of them, individually, said her name was Daughter of Mother Jones. They prepared meals for thousands at Camp Solidarity and kept Pittston's executives looking out their office windows at women who would not leave.

By late summer the strike was grinding. Over 4,000 people had been arrested. Union pay had dropped to about $210 a week - less than a third of normal wages. Union leadership picked 99 miners from Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky and told them almost nothing until the morning of the operation. On a single day in September, the 99 walked peacefully into the Moss 3 Preparation Plant near Carbo, Virginia, sat down, and stopped production. Outside, about 5,000 supporters gathered - many of them the women of the coalfields, who had become the public face of the strike. The sit-in held for days. It became the moment when Pittston understood the strike was not collapsing.

The settlement came on February 20, 1990, after ten months. Health and retirement benefits were restored. In 1992, drawing directly on what had happened in southwest Virginia, Congress passed the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act - the Coal Act - which made it law that mining companies must fund health care for retired miners and their dependents. The strike had cost the union dearly in legal fines, much of which dragged through the courts for years. Pittston itself exited the coal business in 2001. But the men who had been told in 1987 that the company was done paying for their care got their care back, and so did every retired American miner after them.