''Trying to get accepted by the guys is just as hard as the work,'' said Donna Lilley, a former seamstress who has worked at the Republic Steel Corporation's Clyde Mine in Washington County for two years. ''You feel like an alien, like something from outer space. The men look at you as if to say, 'What's she doing down here?' Some guys still don't think that women belong there, that it's no place for a woman.''

By the end of 1981, 3,556 women had been hired to shovel coal, lift posts or run machines in underground coal mines. But women make up only 1.25 percent of the work force.

''We're talking about a revolution in America's coal fields,'' said Betty Jean Hall, director of the Coal Employment Project, a nonprofit foundation in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that helps women get hired and keep jobs in the mines.

''We've come a long way, but we've got an awful long way to go,'' she said. ''We're just getting started. Every woman can't do every job in a mine, but neither can every man. There's no job in a mine that some women can't do.''

Women worked in family operations and company mines throughout the Depression and World War II. But Government records show that no women took the required miners' entrance examination before July 27, 1973. First Woman, Name Unknown