Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster.
0:00 /
Table of Contents
About The Book
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).
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).
Excerpt
The Women of the Copper Country Prologue
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.”
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.”
Reading Group Guide
Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! Plus, receive recommendations for your next Book Club read.
By clicking 'Sign me up' I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge the Privacy Policy and Notice of Financial Incentive. Free ebook offer available to NEW US subscribers only. Offer redeemable at Simon & Schuster's ebook fulfillment partner. Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices.
This reading group guide for The Women of the Copper Country includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Mary Doria Russell. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
In The Women of the Copper Country, which opens in July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements has seen enough of the world to know that it is unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan, where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and have barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. 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. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.
In Annie’s hands lie the miners’ fortunes and their health, her husband’s wrath over her growing independence, and her own reputation as she faces the threat of prison and discovers a forbidden love. On her fierce quest for justice, Annie will discover just how much she is willing to sacrifice for her own independence and the families of Calumet.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. The prologue begins with the line “The dream is always simple. The memory never is.” How do you think this opening sets up the rest of the novel?
2. Annie Klobuchar Clements was known as “America’s Joan of Arc.” Despite living centuries apart, how do you think these women were similar? How were they different? Do you think this is an apt moniker?
3. Mr. McNaughton reads the newspaper, summarizing the major issues of the day, and also begins to contemplate the state of the American workforce. He thinks, of immigration, “How much of the Old World’s excess population can America absorb?” What does this say about attitudes about immigration and xenophobia during this time?
4. Annie’s height is frequently mentioned throughout the novel, often in regards to finding a husband, and “she admitted to six foot one when she finally married at eighteen.” Why do you think such emphasis is placed on her height?
5. Chapters open with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. What do you think this represents?
6. At the meeting with Charlie Miller and her fellow women, Annie says “we speak different languages, but we always find a way to talk, don’t we?” How do these women of diverse backgrounds and languages band together throughout the novel?
7. A number of chapters are told from the point of view of Mr. MacNaughton, creating an interesting juxtaposition between his work and that of the miners. How does his life and perspective better illuminate the miners’ struggle?
8. When Mike tells Annie his personal story, he speaks about both photographer Jacob Riis and the Orphan Trains. Do these references give you a better sense of the time period? Are there similarities between Sweeney’s life and the conditions in Calumet?
9. After taking Annie’s photo, comparing her to Joan of Arc, Sweeney mutters, “And that’s the one for the history books.” How was Annie’s public persona and legacy shaped by both the press and those who knew her?
10. The novel makes clear that Annie’s involvement with the union and strike strains her marriage to Joe. How do their perceptions of each other change over the course of the novel?
11. What do you think is the greatest effect of Mother Jones’s visit to Calumet?
12. How does the riot change things for each of the major characters in the novel?
13. Consider the various characters’ reactions to the Italian Hall disaster. What do these reactions say about each of them?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Get out a map and trace the Keweenaw Peninsula region of Upper Michigan, which is still called the Copper Country. What strikes you most about it?
2. A number of other historical women are mentioned in this novel. Research other activists including Joan of Arc, Mother Jones, Ella Bloor, Jane Addams, and Beatrice Potter Webb. Compare their stories to that of Annie Clements.
3. Visit the author’s website marydoriarussell.com to learn more about her and her books.
A Conversation with Mary Doria Russell
This novel utilizes several perspectives, including those of Annie and Mr. MacNaughton. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?
History is never just one person’s story. I have come to think of events like the strike as existing in the center of a dark place; each point of view shines a different kind of light from a different direction. You get a more complete understanding of history when you see it from multiple perspectives.
For this book in particular, I realized that without James MacNaughton’s attitudes and decisions, the Keweenaw copper strike would probably have been settled in a matter of days. We need to see from his point of view what the stakes were, and what his strategy was, in order to understand what his tactics became.
In MacNaughton’s view, the union had declared war on private property rights, but there are additional motives for his actions. His self-image is rooted in his identity as a WASP: a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He truly believes in his right to rule the lives of lesser peoples. He proudly carries the “white man's burden” at a time when Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians were not considered white.
Furthermore, his professional expertise is based on controlling every motion his employees make, from how to scrub a pot to how to shovel ore into a tram; nobody was going to tell him how to do anything. And finally, he has an economic agenda: using Calumet & Hecla’s market strength to drive smaller competitors out of business.
What kind of research did you do to bring this story to life?
I spent time in the Keweenaw Peninsula, walking through the streets of Calumet, touring the mines, talking to people who still live there. There are two museums in the city, and the docents were very helpful, answering my many questions. Michigan Technical University in Houghton has extensive archives online.
It’s important for a novelist to know what you don’t know. I had no background in mining or labor relations, or legal issues, but I knew enough to ask a variety of people to help me understand various elements of the strike. And, of course, there was a massive amount of reading; I collected about ten linear feet of mining and union histories about the Copper Country and about labor organizing and strikes in the southern and western United States.
There have been a few nonfiction treatments of Annie’s life and the copper strike. What made you think the time was right for a work of historical fiction?
The copper strike itself has been studied and written about by historians and legal experts, but those accounts are not meant to engage the emotion of the reader. That's the novelist’s job: to combine imagination and empathy with research.
Strikes are, by their nature, collective actions, so individuals' lives sink into that mass of people in the streets. And, apart from a few well-known figures like Mother Jones and Norma Rae, women usually fade even further into the background of union history.
Miners’ wives were rarely well educated, nor did they have the time and energy to tell their own stories. They were consumed with the daily struggle to keep their families afloat during strikes. Nobody was keeping a diary or writing an autobiography.
Even for Annie Clements, whose name was once well known, the accounts are necessarily thin. We have no interviews, no family memoirs about her. She herself never spoke about her part in the strike after she left Calumet in 1914. Her life seemed significant for less than a year. A few months later, the first world war began, and the newspapers moved on.
And yet, here is a twenty-five-year-old woman who is central to a strike against the most powerful company in the most dangerous industry of her time. A child of despised immigrants. A housewife with a simple education in a time when women couldn’t vote and weren’t supposed to take part in public life. Somehow, she mobilized 10,000 miners and kept everyone going, day after day, month after month.
So my task was to answer Mike Sweeney’s question: What makes a woman like Annie Clements?
As it happens, I know two young people who were well over six feet tall at twelve. They were seen as adults in junior high. They lived with the expectation that they’d be responsible and reliable long before their age mates. Their size has been a dominating element of their maturation. That physical fact was my starting point for Annie.
In late Victorian times, an ideal woman was supposed to be small and weak and quiet, while those fighting for equality were vilified and mocked for being manly. Annie would have taken on that cultural expectation as a girl, and the mockery of boys her age would have reinforced her self-consciousness. She was also supposed to be a mother, and her childlessness was both a sadness and an opportunity.
My feeling was that she'd have devoted herself to her children if she and Joe had been able to have them. She combined her need to nurture with an opportunity to make life better for others through the Women's Auxiliary.
So much of this novel focuses on the strength of unions. Do you see any parallels between the unions of the nineteenth century and today?
The dynamics of labor/management relations remain the same, more than a hundred years after the copper strike. Economic and political power still lies largely in the hands of huge corporations. Sometimes their power is wrapped in paternalism, but it’s always backed by “If you don't like it here, find a job somewhere else.” Take it or leave it.
Unions are meant to balance that corporate power by giving employees a say in how a business runs. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were great advances in labor relations, and ever since there has been fierce corporate resistance to such improvements.
Today, global labor markets and the modern gig economy are undermining any control workers might once have had over their income and their working conditions. Once again, the concentration of wealthy is distorting the lives of 99 percent of the population, but activism is increasing. The pendulum always swings.
We live in interesting times.
Michael Sweeney is a major character, and so much of his work influences the course of this novel. Why did you choose to include a member of the press rather than simply summarizing the press attention the strike received?
I do have a tendency to lean on narrative, but as the drafts of a novel accumulate, I look for ways to see the story through a character’s eyes and make narrative into dialogue. As the dictum goes: show, don't tell.
And, while the delivery of news has changed from newspapers to online media, we still see independent journalists working to get the stories out, to make the larger public aware of hidden conflicts, just as there are still media that spin those stories to protect corporate and political interests.
This novel really shows how the women of Calumet banded together to create change. It’s a truly feminist tale; do you think that our telling of history reflects that?
If it did, there wouldn’t have been so many women wearing pink hats in the streets of Washington!
Throughout my seven decades, there has been a relentless effort to bring women into the civil, legal, academic, and economic power structures, and—no surprise—we have faced the same kind of push-back that was at work in the streets of Calumet in 1913. Belittling, carping, sniping, threats, beatings, rape, and murder are still the tools that are used to keep women out of power.
I wanted to honor our foremothers’ courage and determination in this novel, while acknowledging how exhausting and frightening and dangerous it can be to stand up for change.
You use the perspectives of several children and adolescents throughout the course of the novel. Was that a conscious choice you made? Why were their voices important to include?
I often include a fourteen-year-old or two in my novels! I find that age fascinating. They're almost mature. They're still working out where they fit in the world, but they see that world with fresh eyes. They often reject the entrenched adult beliefs that injustice and stupidity and misery are simply “the way things are.” I love that. I love how vocal and demanding they are, and how willing they are to fight the status quo, whether it’s denial of the climate crisis, or school massacres, or institutional sexism and racism. They are fierce and I admire that.
What was your favorite scene to write? Your least favorite?
It was a pure joy to write Mother Jones’s passages. I didn’t have to make much up! She was a powerhouse, and it was fun to write someone closer to my own age. Writing for MacNaughton wasn't fun. I had to articulate attitudes that I personally find contemptible, but he is as central to the story as Annie Clements.
What do you think is the legacy of the Copper Country Strike of 1913–1914?
Well, up in Calumet, it was much like the Vietnam War was nationally. It divided the city then and it still does to this day. The strike itself changed very little. MacNaughton was rewarded for his part in resisting unionization. The workforce was halved, but that was because of automation—something that continues to be dominant in today's economy.
What we can learn from MacNaughton is that one man can wield outsized power, but also that he will use our divisions against us. What we can learn from the women of the Copper Country is that we can make ourselves heard when we work together. There's power in unity.
Both the riot and Italian Hall disaster are weighty subject matter. How did you manage to write about these with clarity and empathy?
Many, many, many drafts. Two things had to happen. I had to find the most effective pair of eyes with which to see the moments I was depicting. And I had to drain the pathos, to make the moments starker and less emotional. If you’ve seen movies like Platoon and Gladiator, the battle scenes are backed with an adagio, not a scherzo. I wanted the confusion and panic and horror to be experienced as it is in life. Time slows down. People who’ve been through something like that say, “I couldn’t believe what was happening.” Paralysis sets in. It’s only later that you begin to feel the dimensions of the moments.
What are you working on next?
I'm circling back toward some of the themes I explored in The Sparrow and Children of God: science and religion, faith and folly, politics and companionship. Too early to say much more!
Introduction
In The Women of the Copper Country, which opens in July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements has seen enough of the world to know that it is unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan, where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and have barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. 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. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.
In Annie’s hands lie the miners’ fortunes and their health, her husband’s wrath over her growing independence, and her own reputation as she faces the threat of prison and discovers a forbidden love. On her fierce quest for justice, Annie will discover just how much she is willing to sacrifice for her own independence and the families of Calumet.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. The prologue begins with the line “The dream is always simple. The memory never is.” How do you think this opening sets up the rest of the novel?
2. Annie Klobuchar Clements was known as “America’s Joan of Arc.” Despite living centuries apart, how do you think these women were similar? How were they different? Do you think this is an apt moniker?
3. Mr. McNaughton reads the newspaper, summarizing the major issues of the day, and also begins to contemplate the state of the American workforce. He thinks, of immigration, “How much of the Old World’s excess population can America absorb?” What does this say about attitudes about immigration and xenophobia during this time?
4. Annie’s height is frequently mentioned throughout the novel, often in regards to finding a husband, and “she admitted to six foot one when she finally married at eighteen.” Why do you think such emphasis is placed on her height?
5. Chapters open with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. What do you think this represents?
6. At the meeting with Charlie Miller and her fellow women, Annie says “we speak different languages, but we always find a way to talk, don’t we?” How do these women of diverse backgrounds and languages band together throughout the novel?
7. A number of chapters are told from the point of view of Mr. MacNaughton, creating an interesting juxtaposition between his work and that of the miners. How does his life and perspective better illuminate the miners’ struggle?
8. When Mike tells Annie his personal story, he speaks about both photographer Jacob Riis and the Orphan Trains. Do these references give you a better sense of the time period? Are there similarities between Sweeney’s life and the conditions in Calumet?
9. After taking Annie’s photo, comparing her to Joan of Arc, Sweeney mutters, “And that’s the one for the history books.” How was Annie’s public persona and legacy shaped by both the press and those who knew her?
10. The novel makes clear that Annie’s involvement with the union and strike strains her marriage to Joe. How do their perceptions of each other change over the course of the novel?
11. What do you think is the greatest effect of Mother Jones’s visit to Calumet?
12. How does the riot change things for each of the major characters in the novel?
13. Consider the various characters’ reactions to the Italian Hall disaster. What do these reactions say about each of them?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Get out a map and trace the Keweenaw Peninsula region of Upper Michigan, which is still called the Copper Country. What strikes you most about it?
2. A number of other historical women are mentioned in this novel. Research other activists including Joan of Arc, Mother Jones, Ella Bloor, Jane Addams, and Beatrice Potter Webb. Compare their stories to that of Annie Clements.
3. Visit the author’s website marydoriarussell.com to learn more about her and her books.
A Conversation with Mary Doria Russell
This novel utilizes several perspectives, including those of Annie and Mr. MacNaughton. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?
History is never just one person’s story. I have come to think of events like the strike as existing in the center of a dark place; each point of view shines a different kind of light from a different direction. You get a more complete understanding of history when you see it from multiple perspectives.
For this book in particular, I realized that without James MacNaughton’s attitudes and decisions, the Keweenaw copper strike would probably have been settled in a matter of days. We need to see from his point of view what the stakes were, and what his strategy was, in order to understand what his tactics became.
In MacNaughton’s view, the union had declared war on private property rights, but there are additional motives for his actions. His self-image is rooted in his identity as a WASP: a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He truly believes in his right to rule the lives of lesser peoples. He proudly carries the “white man's burden” at a time when Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians were not considered white.
Furthermore, his professional expertise is based on controlling every motion his employees make, from how to scrub a pot to how to shovel ore into a tram; nobody was going to tell him how to do anything. And finally, he has an economic agenda: using Calumet & Hecla’s market strength to drive smaller competitors out of business.
What kind of research did you do to bring this story to life?
I spent time in the Keweenaw Peninsula, walking through the streets of Calumet, touring the mines, talking to people who still live there. There are two museums in the city, and the docents were very helpful, answering my many questions. Michigan Technical University in Houghton has extensive archives online.
It’s important for a novelist to know what you don’t know. I had no background in mining or labor relations, or legal issues, but I knew enough to ask a variety of people to help me understand various elements of the strike. And, of course, there was a massive amount of reading; I collected about ten linear feet of mining and union histories about the Copper Country and about labor organizing and strikes in the southern and western United States.
There have been a few nonfiction treatments of Annie’s life and the copper strike. What made you think the time was right for a work of historical fiction?
The copper strike itself has been studied and written about by historians and legal experts, but those accounts are not meant to engage the emotion of the reader. That's the novelist’s job: to combine imagination and empathy with research.
Strikes are, by their nature, collective actions, so individuals' lives sink into that mass of people in the streets. And, apart from a few well-known figures like Mother Jones and Norma Rae, women usually fade even further into the background of union history.
Miners’ wives were rarely well educated, nor did they have the time and energy to tell their own stories. They were consumed with the daily struggle to keep their families afloat during strikes. Nobody was keeping a diary or writing an autobiography.
Even for Annie Clements, whose name was once well known, the accounts are necessarily thin. We have no interviews, no family memoirs about her. She herself never spoke about her part in the strike after she left Calumet in 1914. Her life seemed significant for less than a year. A few months later, the first world war began, and the newspapers moved on.
And yet, here is a twenty-five-year-old woman who is central to a strike against the most powerful company in the most dangerous industry of her time. A child of despised immigrants. A housewife with a simple education in a time when women couldn’t vote and weren’t supposed to take part in public life. Somehow, she mobilized 10,000 miners and kept everyone going, day after day, month after month.
So my task was to answer Mike Sweeney’s question: What makes a woman like Annie Clements?
As it happens, I know two young people who were well over six feet tall at twelve. They were seen as adults in junior high. They lived with the expectation that they’d be responsible and reliable long before their age mates. Their size has been a dominating element of their maturation. That physical fact was my starting point for Annie.
In late Victorian times, an ideal woman was supposed to be small and weak and quiet, while those fighting for equality were vilified and mocked for being manly. Annie would have taken on that cultural expectation as a girl, and the mockery of boys her age would have reinforced her self-consciousness. She was also supposed to be a mother, and her childlessness was both a sadness and an opportunity.
My feeling was that she'd have devoted herself to her children if she and Joe had been able to have them. She combined her need to nurture with an opportunity to make life better for others through the Women's Auxiliary.
So much of this novel focuses on the strength of unions. Do you see any parallels between the unions of the nineteenth century and today?
The dynamics of labor/management relations remain the same, more than a hundred years after the copper strike. Economic and political power still lies largely in the hands of huge corporations. Sometimes their power is wrapped in paternalism, but it’s always backed by “If you don't like it here, find a job somewhere else.” Take it or leave it.
Unions are meant to balance that corporate power by giving employees a say in how a business runs. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were great advances in labor relations, and ever since there has been fierce corporate resistance to such improvements.
Today, global labor markets and the modern gig economy are undermining any control workers might once have had over their income and their working conditions. Once again, the concentration of wealthy is distorting the lives of 99 percent of the population, but activism is increasing. The pendulum always swings.
We live in interesting times.
Michael Sweeney is a major character, and so much of his work influences the course of this novel. Why did you choose to include a member of the press rather than simply summarizing the press attention the strike received?
I do have a tendency to lean on narrative, but as the drafts of a novel accumulate, I look for ways to see the story through a character’s eyes and make narrative into dialogue. As the dictum goes: show, don't tell.
And, while the delivery of news has changed from newspapers to online media, we still see independent journalists working to get the stories out, to make the larger public aware of hidden conflicts, just as there are still media that spin those stories to protect corporate and political interests.
This novel really shows how the women of Calumet banded together to create change. It’s a truly feminist tale; do you think that our telling of history reflects that?
If it did, there wouldn’t have been so many women wearing pink hats in the streets of Washington!
Throughout my seven decades, there has been a relentless effort to bring women into the civil, legal, academic, and economic power structures, and—no surprise—we have faced the same kind of push-back that was at work in the streets of Calumet in 1913. Belittling, carping, sniping, threats, beatings, rape, and murder are still the tools that are used to keep women out of power.
I wanted to honor our foremothers’ courage and determination in this novel, while acknowledging how exhausting and frightening and dangerous it can be to stand up for change.
You use the perspectives of several children and adolescents throughout the course of the novel. Was that a conscious choice you made? Why were their voices important to include?
I often include a fourteen-year-old or two in my novels! I find that age fascinating. They're almost mature. They're still working out where they fit in the world, but they see that world with fresh eyes. They often reject the entrenched adult beliefs that injustice and stupidity and misery are simply “the way things are.” I love that. I love how vocal and demanding they are, and how willing they are to fight the status quo, whether it’s denial of the climate crisis, or school massacres, or institutional sexism and racism. They are fierce and I admire that.
What was your favorite scene to write? Your least favorite?
It was a pure joy to write Mother Jones’s passages. I didn’t have to make much up! She was a powerhouse, and it was fun to write someone closer to my own age. Writing for MacNaughton wasn't fun. I had to articulate attitudes that I personally find contemptible, but he is as central to the story as Annie Clements.
What do you think is the legacy of the Copper Country Strike of 1913–1914?
Well, up in Calumet, it was much like the Vietnam War was nationally. It divided the city then and it still does to this day. The strike itself changed very little. MacNaughton was rewarded for his part in resisting unionization. The workforce was halved, but that was because of automation—something that continues to be dominant in today's economy.
What we can learn from MacNaughton is that one man can wield outsized power, but also that he will use our divisions against us. What we can learn from the women of the Copper Country is that we can make ourselves heard when we work together. There's power in unity.
Both the riot and Italian Hall disaster are weighty subject matter. How did you manage to write about these with clarity and empathy?
Many, many, many drafts. Two things had to happen. I had to find the most effective pair of eyes with which to see the moments I was depicting. And I had to drain the pathos, to make the moments starker and less emotional. If you’ve seen movies like Platoon and Gladiator, the battle scenes are backed with an adagio, not a scherzo. I wanted the confusion and panic and horror to be experienced as it is in life. Time slows down. People who’ve been through something like that say, “I couldn’t believe what was happening.” Paralysis sets in. It’s only later that you begin to feel the dimensions of the moments.
What are you working on next?
I'm circling back toward some of the themes I explored in The Sparrow and Children of God: science and religion, faith and folly, politics and companionship. Too early to say much more!
About The Author
Photograph by Dina A. Rossi
Widely praised for her meticulous research, fine prose, and compelling narrative drive, Mary Doria Russell is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Sparrow, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, Dreamers of the Day, Doc, and Epitaph. Dr. Russell holds a PhD in biological anthropology. She lives in Lyndhurst, Ohio.
Product Details
- Publisher: Atria Books (July 7, 2020)
- Length: 368 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982109592
Browse Related Books
Raves and Reviews
“Historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Fictionalized history with an important message that will resonate with contemporary readers.”
– Booklist
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): The Women of the Copper Country Trade Paperback 9781982109592
- Author Photo (jpg): Mary Doria Russell Photograph by Dina A. Rossi(0.1 MB)
Any use of an author photo must include its respective photo credit
