The band of small-town American wives who rallied a miners’ strike
In June 1983, a young freelance journalist, fresh out of graduate school, landed an assignment covering the Phelps Dodge copper-mine strike in Arizona. Soon she was regularly driving the 350-mile round trip from Tucson to the tiny mining towns of Ajo and Clifton, where, by the end of the summer, she became known as “that gal that’s writing the book about us”. Quite how this label came about, she’s still not sure. She hadn’t arrived with this intention. But the story found her as much as she found it. The result was Holding the Line, first published in 1989 – part-oral history, part-social critique – by a then-unknown writer, Barbara Kingsolver.
Thirty-five years later, Kingsolver is the author of several bestselling and prize-winning novels, the most recent of which – last year’s Demon Copperhead, which portrays the ravages of the opioid crisis in rural Appalachia – won her the Women’s Prize (for the second time) and the Pulitzer. “I’ve spent my writing life trying to listen to people who aren’t getting heard,” she explains in the introduction she has written to this new edition of Holding the Line, now being published in the UK for the first time.
During the 18-month strike, Kingsolver listened to the town’s women – white and Hispanic – many of whom were married to the miners. An injunction threatened the strikers (the overwhelming majority of whom were men) with arrest if more than 100 of them were on the main gate’s picket line. But no such sanction applied to their wives. Without jobs to go to, the men often struggled emotionally. The women, meanwhile – already used to making ends meet, running homes and holding families together – came into their own. “It’s just our nature to keep going through it all,” one told Kingsolver.
They organised and ran food and clothing banks, helped to man a free clinic, and rallied both national and international support through public speaking gigs, all while holding the picket line, and taking on the National Guard – who, in a disproportionally aggressive response, were called in by Phelps Dodge and their political cronies. The “female camaraderie” that emerged was a “heady discovery” for many whose previous notion of agency had been a lone trip to the grocery store. These women, as Kingsolver eloquently explains, found “a new way of looking at a power structure in which they’d been lodged like gravel in a tire”.
Reviewing the original US edition for The New York Times, Page Stegner scolded Kingsolver for not including testimony from the men involved. This left, he complained, the impression of a world devoid of men. “It’s hard to align that world with my experience of copper-mining communities in Arizona,” he continued, revealing precisely why Holding the Line demanded to be written. Stories about copper-mining communities – good, bad or legendary – were dominated by the male point of view. Sure, Kingsolver’s book was biased: she’s on the side of the strikers; and within the striking community, it’s the women’s stories that she’s interested in. But, as she reminds contemporary readers, that’s because “women scrapping tooth and nail for survival, however commonplace, don’t get much dignified exposure in our culture.”
In many ways, Holding the Line is a period piece, but it’s fascinating to read today how Kingsolver wrestles with issues that have only gone mainstream in the last few years: namely, intersectional feminism. The strike might not have ended the way those involved hoped – replacement workers were hired and the unions were eventually decertified – but it resulted in other unexpected and significant gains. Towards the end of the book, Kingsolver quotes a speech given by Anna O’Leary, a Hispanic woman whose politicisation by the strike has drastically changed her. This comes after the strike, and O’Leary has just returned from Forum ’85, held in Nairobi as part of the UN’s World Conference on Women. With their calls for “equal pay for equal work”, the other US emissaries, who included Ronald Reagan’s daughter, were “representing women who already had the advantage of a job”, O’Leary tells Kingsolver.
She, on the other hand – and the envoys from Third World countries – were there to speak for “women who are functionally illiterate, who are from working-class neighbourhoods with no opportunities for education, for employment, nobody to watch their kids for them”. Give these women an opportunity, Kingsolver’s book shows us, and they’ll more than rise to the challenge.
Holding the Line is published by Faber at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books