Acclaimed fiction-writer Kingsolver (The Bean Trees, 1987);
Homeland and Other Stories, p. 572) worked as a journalist covering
the strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation (June 1983
to about December 1985) that shook the economic and social order in
several isolated Arizona towns. Her partisan account focuses on how
women - as miners, but more often as members of the Women's
Auxiliary - emerged to play a major role both in the conflict and
in grass-roots labor organization. There's much interesting
material here about the past role of women and MexicanAmericans in
the labor movement, some shockers about union-busting, and
thoughtprovoking material about the strike's uneasy conclusion:
workers losing their jobs, mining operations closing, the
increasingly radicalized women who eventually defied not just the
company but the male leadership of the union emerging with a
personal sense of empowerment. But the book is not as successful in
one of its stated goals: presenting the human drama, Kingsolver
relies heavily on interviews; the quotes go on too long; the women
often tell similar stories and their personalities rarely emerge. A
better read would be Kingsolver's own short story "Why I Am a
Danger to the Public" (from Homeland), which needs fewer than 20
pages to present a vivid fictionalized version, including violent
hostility between striking and scab families; the arrival of
heavily armed State Police; evictions from company housing, etc.
Provocative but limited: the makings of a few excellent magazine
articles fall short as a book. (Kirkus Reviews)
Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book,
is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set
in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and
part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which
occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's
award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written
book grounded on the strength of its characters.
Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against
Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers
lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered
the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining
towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't
leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when
injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and
daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike
dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to
picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the
towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the
same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners
Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we
were just a bunch of ladies."
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