Laura Leedy GanslerCritiques

"Just like that affirmative action had come to the Iron Range, and it set the stage for Lois Jenson and a handful of women desperate for a decent wage to walk into a place that had been forced by the federal government to hire them".

Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law by Clara Bingham

Class Action is a very well written book. For those that don't know..this is the book that inspired the movie "North Country".

It is all about the Sexual Harassment case brought by Mine Workers that changed Sexual Harassment Laws. In the movie, Charlize Theron plays the lead. It is quite a story and not a happy one. Both the book and the film are excellent.

I enjoyed this book greatly. It goes into way more detail then the movie did and sort of fills in many of the blanks.

It's a very sad book too. There was so much that happened. But it is so odd reading it in that it is Non Fiction and: warning to any feminist: I am sure the book might make you angry. The reason it will make you angry is because of the deplorable and disgusting treatment of the women. But it's an important book to read and educational as well.

The book contains much Legal speak and I will admit there are parts that are a bit wordy and seemingly very long winded but it is pretty easy to read overall. It's an important book as well and educational although aspects of it are not easy to read.

Anyone interested in the subject matter would most likely really want to read this.

Wonderful, wonderful. I can't praise it enough or the courage it took the women, Lois Jenson in particular, to fight corporate misogyny. The movie it was made into, North Country, toned down the abuse and greatly shortened the battle this woman fought - 10 years. Who of us would have the strength to endure what she did for us all?

After learning of her pending marriage, Emma runs away from home and finds untold opportunities dressing and acting like a boy. When the Civil War breaks out, Emma enlists. She serves in many positions, first as a male nurse and then as a mail carrier. The book briefly discusses claims that she had worked as a spy, recounting several dangerous experience. After falling ill, Emma runs away, worried that her true sex will be discovered. Returning to the life of a woman, she marries. Encouraged by those around her, she fights for a Civil War pension and reunites with her former comrades.

This book as written in a very matter of fact way. I would have liked more of a story-telling element, rather than a recitation of facts. At times the book does deliver this, but at others is a bit dry. Overall, the book was well written, well documented and an interesting read.

This is a non-fiction book about a woman who fought in the Civil War dressed as a man and was the only woman to receive a veteran pension for serving in this war. The author reconstructed her story from her journals and journals and letters of men who served with her. Thompson first assumed a male attire before the war in order to escape her home and worked as a traveling bookseller, making a quick success of it. When the war started, she enlisted partly because she was a convinced abolitionist and partly because she was lonely, as her lifestyle made it difficult to form friendships. Interestingly, the author observes that there were a number of women who joined the army at that time, usually in order not to be parted from their husbands, or to escape their husbands, or to get better wages. She points out that most men who enlisted also did it for “adventure and glory” rather than for any political reasons. Since in the beginning, everybody thought it would end quickly (as did the Southerners), men rushed to join, afraid that if they didn’t do so immediately, they’d miss “all the fun.” The author describes how lots of civilians accompanied the soldiers in carriages, with picnic baskets on their laps, to what most people assumed would be the first and only battle of the civil war. As poignantly, we read how Davis and Lincoln “danced” around each other, each trying to save face and let the other take the responsibility for starting the war.

This book also provides an interesting perspective on General McClelan. The author shows that he was a good strategist, but as the war started, he found out that he couldn’t send people into danger, and so he was looking for ways to capture the confederate capital by shelling it or some other relatively bloodless means, which took time. The soldiers very much appreciated his conscientiousness; he was so popular with the army, that when another commander was appointed in his place, the troops clamored for him not to give in and promised to support him in a military coup! He asked them to support his successor as they had supported him, but this obviously gave him an idea to try to run for president against Lincoln. In an interesting parallel, Emma Thompson found that she couldn’t fire at the enemy, and so she specialized in getting wounded men out of the field and to where they could be treated. She did risk her life a great deal, but never fired a shot. She discovered a talent for nursing, and two years into the war, when female nurses became acceptable, she changed back to female attire and worked in one of the military hospitals. She also wrote a book based largely on her war experiences to raise money for military hospitals. Sometime after the war, Thompson got married, raised two adopted sons (all their own children died very young) and was very respected in the community. The author says that she liked to wear breeches, especially when working in the garden, and neither her husband nor the neighbors objected! So you get a life story of an interesting woman, but also a bigger picture of life at this time.

Wow. This book is well worth reading, not for any great artistry of prose, but for the story it tells. This case, dramatized (and actually toned down, I hear) for the big screen as North Country is unbelievable. Unbelievable the crap these women went through in order to get a living wage, unbelievable the tactics brought to bear against them by the company's lawyers, and unbelievable, to me at least, that this case and all its legal implications were not resolved until 1998.

I think by 1998 I'd already heard a contemporary say that feminism was 'over' because it had done its work back in the 1970s. Hell, maybe I thought it myself. The fight for equity wasn't and isn't over, and this clearly written account (co-authored by a lawyer and a reporter) will make you grateful for the laws that protect everyone at work today in America, and the sacrifices that were made to get them.½

This was an excellent read. Being a true story about the U.S.'s first sexual harrassment class action, I expected it to be a dry chore to read, but the opposite proved true. The writers wrote it in the style of "creative nonfiction" weaving the kind of compelling narrative usually not found within nonfiction legal cases. Even though I was already aware of the overall outcome of the lawsuit, having been introduced to the story via the movie North Country, and had researched the case itself afterward, still the writing was engaging enough that it was difficult to pry myself away from the book once I started reading.

The book is so much better than the movie. It gives you a much truer sense of what the women went through. Which is to be expected, of course, but I was surprised at the changes in the movie.