Character Analysis
The Stitch and B**** Club is basically the Grace, Arizona version of the Sons of Anarchy, except instead of running drugs and getting in fights, these ladies make paper-mâché peacocks and bring the pain to mining companies.
These women basically started as a crafts club to knit things together and have fundraisers, but as the health of Grace's orchards starts to worsen, it becomes clear that the men are unable to wrap their minds around the urgency of the problem. That's when the Stitch and B**** ladies take matters into their own hands.
Only a few members are specifically named. Doña Althea leads, and Viola Domingos is a major player—she even thinks up the peacock-selling scheme. Uda Dell, Codi's former nanny, is a member. Norma Galvez gets the ladies out of a jam with the law by making friends with a Tucson policeman named officer Metz, and Mrs. Nuñez makes some of the best piñatas out of the blue flyleaves from her Encyclopedia set. Miss Lorraine Colder and Miss Elva Dann are two retired teachers from Codi's own school days who—though it's not ever explicitly stated—are probably life partners and lovers.
Other members go unnamed (Mrs. Dynamite—who suggests that the ladies use their husband's knowledge of explosives to destroy the bulldozers, is kind of borderline), but they're categorized across the board as a kind of army of fighting femmes.
They wear red dresses with cat-eye glasses, and Steelworkers T-shirts with navy hair bows. They call meetings to order by banging on the table with a high-heeled pump. In fact, every description of the ladies of Stitch and B**** emphasizes both their femininity and their toughness. Their power suggests that part of what's changing in Grace now that the mining company is gone is a transfer of power from men to women.
In fact, Kingsolver symbolizes this new matriarchal shift explicitly. On the way home from a particularly rowdy meeting, Codi notices that all the male peacocks in the orchards have molted. Sorry, dudes, it looks like the ladies are taking your tail feathers, because you rely too much on the rule of law.