Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community.
For this new edition, Kingsolver has revised the first chapter and written a new introduction, which explains the book's particular importance. " Holding the Line was a watershed event for me because it taught me to pay attention: to know the place where I lived. Since then I've written other books, most of them set in the vine-scented, dusty climate of Southwestern class struggle.... My hope for you, as a person now holding this book, is that the reading will bring you some of what the writing brought to me. Whether or not you can claim any interest in a gritty little town smack in the middle of nowhere that hosted a long-ago mine strike, I hope in the end you will care about its courage and sagacity."
Excerpt
The Devil's Domain
Flossie Navarro is a sturdy woman, strong-boned and handsome, with a lightness in her bearing that has stood up to some seventy years of a rock-hard life. Those years have neither dulled her mind nor dented her will. She says she isn't leaving Clifton, Arizona -- not now, and not ever. There has been talk of moving people out, but she and her husband Ed are permanently settled here in their weathered-white frame house on the floodplain of the San Francisco River.
But back in 1944 when she left her family's farm in Arkansas and struck out for Arizona, Flossie was footloose and on her own. She'd heard that the copper mines out west were hiring women to keep the smelter fires burning while the men were off fighting World War II. The rumors proved true: the Phelps Dodge Mining Company promptly hired her on at the mine of her choice. She chose the Morenci pit at Clifton, with a trace of lingering homesickness -- she'd asked, and was told that of all the Arizona mines this one was the closest to Arkansas.
The next day she embarked on the career of her life. "I did anything," she says. "I'd get a shovel and shovel, push a wheelbarrow, load that wheelbarrow and dump it on a belt, whatever they said. I was raised on a farm, and we girls did everything there was to do on a farm, but not necessarily like that. It was hard work, and when we went to the bucket room where they run the samples, it was extra-hard work. We'd have to stand and collect mud and water and put it in a bucket for eight hours straight. On our shift it was all women, except for the floorwalkers." A floorwalker, according to Flossie, is a man who "noses around and sees what he can find out to go tell on people to get them in trouble." These were the only men she ever saw in the concentrator and the ball mill. She declares simply, "Those women kept that mine going."
Even so, the women who walked to work every morning in their coveralls, hairnets, and hard hats, telling jokes and swinging their lunch buckets, were tugging at the moorings of the status quo. Clifton was a traditional Catholic town where a woman's world was quietly, immutably defined by the walls of her home. Those who worked in the mine were considered unwomanly at best -- and at worst, unladylike. Some people hinted they were prostitutes. This didn't slow Flossie down. "Well, sure, the men would call you a nasty name, but you'd learn how to call them one back and go ahead. I always said if I wanted to go and do such things I would sure find a nicer place to do them than in the muck and the water on the ball mill floor!"
from pp. 3-4
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