The aim of the report was, in principle, to collect and denounce the extreme conditions under which children were working in mines. But that wasn't what caused the Good Victorians, but the knowledge that women working in the mines were stripped from the waist up; the unbearable temperature of the holes in the mines made the miner almost naked.

The newspapers The Times and The Morning Chronicle launched a campaign to ban these women from working in mines and publishing the engravings that represented them. Count of Shaftesury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, delivered a speech in Parliament: “You can’t imagine a more obscene and disgusting image than seeing these girls working. Not even in the
brothels.” But Lord Ashley had never gone into the mine to check it out. The members of the Employment Committee, Jelinger Symons and Samuel Scriven, visited several mines to carry out the report, but they did not obtain any evidence either. Scriven revealed in his report that he had once seen a shirtless “woman” at the Hopwood Mine (Yorkshire), a 10-year-old girl, Susan Pitchforth.

However, there were dozens of testimonies they received against these women, improbable but of ardent opinion: immorality was widespread, miners rejected their eagerness to be honest mothers and wives and the proof of this was that they had stopped attending Mass on Sunday.

Women tried to justify themselves. Some people said that when they came home they were too tired to clean the house or to take care of the children, but they made an effort. Others used Sundays to do all the work accumulated at home during the week. Margaret Baxter, a 50-year-old miner, explained that she was entering the mine at four in the morning and that she was going out at noon to take care of her sick husband and teach her daughters to sew. Ann Fern and Bessy Bailey had to spend Sundays learning how to cook and sew and so they couldn’t go to Mass…

Useless. In the summer of 1842, two months after the scandal, the London Parliament passed the Mining and Coal Law to ban work in mines on children and women under the age of 10. “Working in the mine isn’t nice, but it’s worse to starve,” one miner said.

And so, some continued to work in the mine, as it was beneficial for families – to fatten a little the low incomes – and, above all, for employers; women paid less than half of their wages. In addition, fines were not very high and most of the time women were deprived of their worst salaries.