The Women of the Copper Country

“When your head is high, you can see farther than anyone else.”

When Annie’s father tells her this, she doesn’t yet understand how true it will be. But when she sees the injustice faced all around her by Calument miners, she knows someone has to stand up for worker’s rights.

The Women of the Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell is the powerful story of “Big Annie” Clements, the woman behind the strike of the Calumet copper mines in 1913-14. This book is a stark reminder of why we fight and struggle for workers’ rights and against robber barons and cronyism, with its raw and realistic display of the lives of miners’ women in an age when women could not yet vote.

This narrative takes a complicated and emotional historical event and makes it vivid and heart-wrenching. The historical detail is amazing, drawing on the unimaginable hardships the miners and their families endured. The heavy emotions are handled carefully, creating a story that is beautifully told and not overcome by sentimentality. It’s a haunting story of people, hardship, loss, and a tragic event that was all but lost to history, but never lost to those who lived it.