Book Review: "Holding the Line"

Holding the Line is Barbara Kingsolver's first book, published in 1989. It is a journalistic account of events surrounding the 1983-84 Arizona copper miners' strike against the Phelps Dodge Corporation, specifically documenting the actions of the women -- miners and wives of miners.

Phelps Dodge miners struck when the new contract being offered them would have forced them to take cuts in wages, benefits, holiday and vacation time, and eliminate any cost of living allowance. The deck was stacked against the strikers from the start. Union membership had been in decline for several years already, and the outcome of the air traffic controllers' strike had been carefully noted by corporations across the country. The media portrayed the strikers as greedy, and later, violent troublemakers. Governor Bruce Babbitt, a democrat who had been elected with massive support from organized labor, sided with Phelps Dodge and provided both state police and National Guard troops to police strikers and protect scab labor as Phelps Dodge brought in replacement workers.

The short story is, that after 18 long months, the strike was broken and the union decertified. Kingsolver's subtext, however, is a story of empowerment of the women who held the line, who kept the strike going for those 18 months, when their husbands were barred by law from picketing outside the gates of the mines.

Arizona has a number of extremely rural, isolated communities. The populations of these communities were largely native Tohono O'Odham and Mexican-American -- from families who had been living there long before there was a United States of America or a state of Arizona. Many of them had a family history of being pushed off their land by Phelps Dodge and the other mining companies that moved in around the turn of the twentieth century. Most of them grew up in union families, with a collective memory of many strikes. Time and again, when Kingsolver asked strikers why they stayed with the union they'd say, "My dad was a union man. We saw what the union did for him."

In 1983 the women's movement was still young, and needless to say, Arizona's rural mining communities were not bastions of radical feminism. There were a handful of women employed in the mine, some who had come during WW2 when the need was great, and then fought for the right to stay on, and others who had started working in the seventies. By and large though, the
women Kingsolver wrote about had been homemakers when they formed the Morenci Miners Women's Auxillary. What they experienced in those 18 months wrought some extraordinary changes on many of their lives.

It was difficult to read this book and not think about what we have lost as a nation, not just in the last 7 years of the Bush regime, but in all of those years since Reagan became president in 1980. Kingsolver makes some excellent points about, for example, American citizens wanting to get tough on crime by expanding police forces -- but what happens when a police force is turned against law-abiding American people?

It was especially heartening to me to hear many of the women connecting the dots between what had happened to them and what was beginning to come to light about the U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. I also couldn't help but wonder if those same women were able to hold on to that connectednes and apply it to all that has happened in this country since 2001.

I have to say that I was bothered by the continual militancy of the strikers' actions -- screaming at scabs, rock-throwing, getting into fights at the five-and-dime. On the one hand, you have a group of people who are clearly being discriminated against and disenfranchised, and you have to ask, "What else can they do?" On the other hand, I kept thinking about Gandhian principles of nonviolent resistance, which I believe in my heart of hearts to be not only the right way, but infinitely more effective in the long run.

In the end, it was clear that Phelps Dodge was making a concerted -- and often illegal -- effort to break the union. They got away with it, and that is what we have seen happening time and time again over the last 25 years. The tide may be turning. The other day I read that, for the first time since the seventies union membership is on the increase. Hallelujah!

I usually enjoy Barbara Kingsolver's books, and this one was no exception. If you care about labor or women's history, you will find this a compelling read.