The Women of the Copper Country

by Mary Doria Russell Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Sparrow comes “historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today” (Kirkus Reviews) about “America's Joan of Arc”-the courageous woman who started a rebellion by leading a strike against the largest copper mining company in the world.

In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements has seen enough of the world to know that it's unfair. She's spent her whole life in the mining town of Calumet, Michigan, where men risk their lives for meager salaries-and have barely enough to put food on the table for their families. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren't coming home. So, when Annie decides to stand up for the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.

Yet as Annie struggles to improve the future of her town, her husband becomes increasingly frustrated with her growing independence. She faces the threat of prison while also discovering a forbidden love. On her fierce quest for justice, Annie will see just how much she is willing to sacrifice for the families of Calumet.

From one of the most versatile writers in contemporary fiction, this novel is an authentic and moving historical portrait of the lives of the crucial men and women of the early labor movement “with an important message that will resonate with contemporary readers” (Booklist).

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile

Cassandra Campbell narrates Russell’s historical novel, which holds a mirror up to current affairs. Life is hard for everyone in Michigan’s copper country in the early twentieth century; after yet another funeral, Annie Clements decides that enough is enough and organizes a strike. While Campbell’s delivery can occasionally be a little flat, she does a good job with the various accents of the Calumet miners and townsfolk. Where Campbell especially shines is in her portrayal of Annie, who is ground down over the nine brutal months of the 1913-14 strike. Campbell illuminates her decline from an eager, idealistic young woman to a resigned, slightly bitter woman who is simply too exhausted to continue. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Booklist

Fictionalized history with an important message that will resonate with contemporary readers.

Booklist

Fictionalized history with an important message that will resonate with contemporary readers.

Kirkus Reviews

2019-05-13
Russell (Epitaph, 2015, etc.) offers a lesson in American labor relations in this fictional portrait of Anna Klobuchar Clements, a 25-year-old miner's wife who led a wildcat strike against the large Calumet, Michigan, copper mining company Calumet & Hecla in 1913.

Though little remembered today, Annie Clements acquired the soubriquet "America's Joan of Arc" for her leadership during the monthslong labor uprising involving as many as 9,000 miners. Annie comes across as a larger-than-life heroine—physically striking at 6-foot-1—although also a warmhearted woman with an increasingly conflicted emotional life. Initially she seems no different from other miners' wives, stretching pennies to keep house while accepting her husband Joe's drunken bluster and beatings without complaint. Her sorrow is that after seven years of marriage she has yet to conceive. Instead of motherhood, Annie has thrown herself into her responsibilities as president of the Women's Auxiliary of Local 15, the Western Federation of Miners. No matter that Joe refuses to join the union. A miner's death pushes Annie to call for a strike to improve salaries and safety conditions. Experienced union organizer Charlie Miller (a fictional composite of two real union leaders) doubts the strike will succeed, but he recognizes that Annie is a powerhouse he must support. Charlie invites photographer/reporter Michael Sweeney (also a composite) to Calumet to get national coverage. Michael finds himself drawn not only to the drama of the strike, but also to Annie, who inevitably discovers she reciprocates his desire. Union icon Mother Jones makes a cameo appearance, and then there's Annie's real-life nemesis, James MacNaughton, the company's general manager, whose interest in hygiene seems almost progressive until he reveals himself as a greedy capitalist committed to maximum efficiency and profit whatever the human cost. Russell writes with her usual verve, but readers will miss the emotional density of her best work, in which abundant research melts into the human drama; here, characters often feel like puppets manipulated to sell a slice of union history from a decidedly anti-capitalist angle.

Historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170480586
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Women of the Copper Country

Turn tears to fires

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The dream is always simple. The memory never is.

It’s an echo from 1903 when she was almost sixteen. A rare family outing down to the county fair in Houghton, Michigan.

Her father probably expected the excursion to cheer her up. There were horse races and ox pulls, all day long. A merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. Games of chance. Vendors calling their wares. Quilts, pies, and jams vying for blue ribbons. The promise of fireworks after dark. But there were crowds as well. Strangers. People who’d never before seen the girl called Big Annie up in Calumet.

At twenty-five, Anna Klobuchar Clements would be known around the world as America’s Joan of Arc. Ten thousand miners would march behind her in a wildcat strike against the richest, most powerful copper company on earth. But that day at the Houghton fair? She was just a big, gawky girl—tired to tears of being pointed at, remarked upon, ridiculed.

Being tall didn’t bother her when she was five. She liked being the biggest in her kindergarten class. She liked school. She didn’t mind at all when the teachers started calling her Big Annie. It never occurred to anyone that she might be embarrassed by the nickname. It was simply meant to distinguish her from another—much smaller—Annie in her class.

The tall American daughter of tall Slovenian parents, Anna Klobuchar had topped six feet at fifteen. In a mining town increasingly populated by underfed, undersized immigrants fresh off the boat, she could never escape the goggle-eyed notice. The endless, stupid teasing of boys her own age was the worst. As she got taller, they began to feel diminished by her. Intimidated. Irritated by the existence of a girl who was bigger and stronger than they were.

Her younger sister, Maritza, was already engaged. She was barely fourteen but she would marry in a month, long before she reached her full height and got bigger than her husband. And Annie was supposed to be happy about it.

So. That awful county fair in 1903. Which was supposed to cheer her up.

Everybody stared. Grown men came to a stop and demanded, “Jeez, how tall are you anyways?” as though her height were both a marvel and an affront. Women and girls shook their heads and gave silent thanks that they themselves were dainty little things, or at least appeared so when compared to that poor girl. Boys laughed and pointed, calling out familiar taunts, along with new ones that were more hateful. Freak. Giant. Monster. Holy cripes! Look at the size of her! Oughta be in the sideshow with that bearded lady . . .

She stood it as long as she could. Finally, a couple of hours before dusk, she fled toward the cornfields and cherry orchards and pastures beyond the fair. Her sight was still blurred with tears when she heard her father’s voice, just behind her. “Anna, don’t—”

She shattered into frustrated, embarrassed, angry weeping. When the storm passed, she sucked in snot and wiped her nose on the back of her hand and waved toward the crowds. “I’m taller than every boy in Calumet. I’m probably taller than every boy in Michigan! Nobody will ever marry me. Why do I have to be so tall?”

“Your mother’s tall,” he said. “She got me.”

Which didn’t help.

It was a relief to the pair of them when they were startled by the hushed roar of a gas-fired burner behind them, just over a little hill. They turned, and looked up, and saw a huge balloon rising. Red, white, and blue silk, billowing.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he suggested. “Just us. Me and you.”

Years later, she would ask herself, Where did he find the wisdom? But that day in Houghton, she wondered where he’d found the cash. Tickets were a day’s pay—each—for a copper miner. She tried to talk him out of it. They both knew her mother would be infuriated by an indulgence like that; nevertheless her father told the balloonist, “Two,” and handed him the money. Together they clambered up and over the edge of a big wicker basket and waited for the other passengers to do the same. The balloon would be tethered— “So you won’t drift out over the lake!” When the basket was full of paying customers, the pilot released the moorings. There were little shrieks of excitement and fear when the basket rocked off the ground. Everyone ducked and laughed nervously when the pilot opened the burner for a fresh blast of heat. And then . . . no sound except for their own breathing as the huge balloon lifted them higher and higher, its colors aglow in the slanting sunlight.

Below them, the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel seemed like wind-up toys made of tin, and people on the fairgrounds looked like tiny flowers on a vast colorful tablecloth laid out for a picnic.

Summer evenings in Upper Michigan are often brilliant with orange and purple and golden clouds. That spectacle can become ordinary to those who live in the far north. What surprised Big Annie was how pretty the land itself was when you could see it from above: greened by the scrubby brush that grew around countless tree stumps, laced by white waves edging the stony shoreline of the Keweenaw Peninsula, surrounded by Lake Superior’s blue depths.

And that is what her dream always feels like. Like floating into the silence, leaving mockery and fear and anger far below. Like soaring upward without the slightest effort and seeing an unexpectedly beautiful world stretched out in all directions . . .

In the next decade, she would more commonly awaken with her heart pounding from a different kind of dream, one in which she runs toward some urgent task, increasingly frantic because she is late and there is always an obstacle of some kind. A train blocking the road. A locked door. Knots of men standing in her way. But now and then, that dream of silent floating would come to her, like a father’s blessing. And she would remember, when she woke, what her father told her that day as they floated far above the Copper Country.

“Stand up straight, Anna. Hold your head high,” he told her. “That’s your strength. You are tall for a reason. When your head is high, you can see farther than anyone else.”

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