Could it be that, not so long ago, this group had indulged in a group hug?
The community organizer pondered this sorrowfully as her beloved Wives group limped into the spring. They were on the verge of splitting, acrimoniously, irrevocably. Things had gotten so bad in the meetings that she’d had to abandon the consensual approach to decision-making so dear to her. Decision-making was now, often as not, conflict resolution, and the conflicts were real, lacerating, vituperative affairs, spiteful and ugly, that threatened to split the group down the middle. As the person most often in the chair, she had watched, powerless, as things spun out of control again and again. They were all on the verge of nervous exhaustion, sick at heart by the grinding poverty of the strike, but the group’s dynamic had assumed a conflictual life of its own, breaking along generational lines that pitted a more traditional woman’s role against a more activist, feminist view. Whatever their ages, the community organizer knew, the cleavage stemmed from a sense of profound impotence. To the older women, perhaps, their inability to help support the family financially was a long-established matter, a social custom, almost. They had long since come to accept that their role was in the home with their husbands the principal breadwinners. But the younger women chafed under this timeworn convention, and the simmering differences broke into roiling, difficult conflict again and again. The younger women were frustrated by the absolute lack of decent work for women in the Sudbury economy. In another sense money—and the nature of the Wives’ organization in relation to the Local Union—had been a flashpoint almost from the beginning of the strike, when, on a bitterly cold and windy November morning, the Wives had unilaterally decided to appear on a fundraising drive at the Falconbridge plant gates. Despite both the frostiness of the morning and the fraught historical relationship between the striking Steelworkers and the workers at Falconbridge, who had voted to remain members of the old Mine Mill Union when the Steelworkers had raided, and nearly decimated Mine Mill, the Wives were warmly greeted at the gates, and the fundraising effort had proved a roaring success.
But the problems had only started there. The Wives now had a modest treasury of their own, and their ambivalent, informal relationship with the Local 6500 Executive would become an issue. The right-wingers surrounding Jordan Nelson had never approved of the Wives. Now, here they were, going to plant gates on their own hook and raising funds in the name of the striking members of Local 6500. But who had control of the money, and where did it actually go? The conservative old guard demanded Nelson take action, which he did by indicating to the Wives that a meeting of the minds was necessary. It would have been easier for the young strike leader to delegate someone else to meet with the Wives, but that was not his way. Instead, Nelson himself ventured into the lion’s den. Molly had quietly apprised him about what he was walking into: the Wives, who had raised the money through their own initiative, were in no mood to brook interference from the male-dominated Executive Board, much less to be told how to spend it, less still to share the proceeds with the Steelworkers.
Knowing the Wives were unaware of the hostility felt toward them by the old guard on his Executive, Nelson struggled manfully to express the feelings of the older, more patriarchal majority on his Executive —views he did not share—without revealing the split within his own leadership the Wives had engendered. It was wheels within wheels, and the results were predictable.
“No, Jordan! I just don’t accept that we, as a group of women, should have to have our actions approved by a bunch of men!” The speaker was Arianna Murdoch, one of the more outspoken of the younger women. With her almost mannish ways and edgy assertiveness she often put off many of the older women, too.
Nelson took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and tried to remain calm. The bargaining committee had been urgently summoned to return to Toronto by the mediators, and it was vital that he put this fire out before his departure. In his absence there was no telling what could happen should the likes of Murdoch ever wind up addressing the Executive in person. Why union leaders get grey.
Jordan tried to size up the group, but other than the fact that they had listened to Murdoch with avidity and that all eyes were now turned to him, he couldn’t tell what they were thinking. They awaited his response in expectant silence. “Okay, okay I get that, and we want you to know we appreciate how much the Wives have done to support the strike,” Nelson began. “All we’re asking is to be informed what it is you’re planning to do next before it happens. No one wants to have control over your group, or its money, just some consultation, is all.”
“And you promise there’ll be no interference from the Local Union?”
“Yes, absolutely. We pretty much have our hands full as it is.” Nelson hoped this wry understatement might draw a laugh, which it did, helping to break the ice. He began to breathe easier.
Alice McCool watched Jordan Nelson’s appearance in appreciative silence, which had become her métier in the Wives’ meetings of late. It wasn’t that she didn’t have opinions about the split opening in the organization. She did. As the group’s matriarch—she was half a generation older than most of the women in the older generation side of the divide—she was pained by the looming split. But she had private worries of her own, namely the health of her daughter-in-law Jo Ann. Her pregnancy had now entered its third trimester, and Alice was concerned. Jo Ann’s colour was unusually high, and her cheeks were often flushed in a way that seemed unhealthy to Alice. There were dark circles around her eyes, which gave them a hollow, haunted aspect uncharacteristic of the normally charismatic, ebullient Jo Ann.
She had sailed through the early months of the pregnancy, carrying the baby high on her slender frame, which had begun to show only later in the game. Since then the baby had dropped precipitously, causing the usual strain—and the usual pain—on her daughter-in-law’s back. Jo Ann had borne all this with fortitude, rarely complaining to her mother-in-law, or as far as Alice could tell, to her son. But now it felt to Alice that everything was coming apart at the seams—the Wives, the strike dragging into yet another season—and she worried for her beautiful daughter-in-law and for the new life she carried within her. Was she getting enough sleep? Alice well remembered how uncomfortable the late stages of a pregnancy could be, especially in bed at night, with your partner fast asleep beside you, and all the natural anxieties for the future closing in, tossing and turning in fruitless, frustrating attempts to find a position comfortable enough to admit the onset of deep sleep.
She really must insist, Alice resolved, that Jo Ann go to her doctor for a routine check-up.