The screenwriter Michael Seitzman has rearranged the facts and created connections that don't exist in the record in order to spread out before us an epic depiction of sexist behavior, covering everything from job discrimination to battery to rape, with every form of Stand-By-Your-Man and blaming-the-victim in between. Josey's father, for instance, is among the miners who believe that women don't belong in the mine (whereas, according to Bingham and Gansler, Jenson's father Joe "was all for his daughter working at the mine"); her supervisor is a guy she flirted with in high school and who witnessed the rape in which her older child was conceived; the lawyer she hires is a friend of Glory's that she's trying to set Josey up with. Meanwhile, her mother (Sissy Spacek) believes Josey's place is at home with her kids, and both her parents turn their backs when her husband shows up and starts manhandling Josey. Dad tells Josey that taking a job at the mine will just humiliate her out-of-work husband, as if that should be her first consideration.

Even the other female mineworkers think that Josey brings trouble on them all by speaking out against their demeaning treatment. Josey, like the Little Red Hen, can't get any of the other women to join in her class action suit, not even Glory who's too devoted to the union and her own sense of invulnerability. In the movie there are only four possible candidates, although the District Court stated, "Plaintiffs asserted that 65 women have been employed at Eveleth Mines since December 13, 1983, and at least 23 women have applied for employment." 139 F.R.D. at 664. And according to Bingham and Gansler, when their attorney said they would need a woman who worked in the pits to make the plaintiffs representative of the class on behalf of which they were suing, Pat Kosmach "chimed in" with, "I've heard a few tough stories out of the pit. I think I can help you find a gal over there who would join us."

North Country is thus not an epic of working-class life but of the various forms of sexual oppression to be encountered in it, and Josey is at the center of every one of them. This has the effect of turning a woman who battled for justice for well over a decade into a perpetual victim. (Even her son turns against her.) With her boo-hoo blue eyes, Theron's Josey is as put-upon as Anna Moore, the country maiden played by Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920). Anna is tricked into a fake wedding by a city slicker and then abandoned; the illegitimate child she gives birth to dies. She finds work on a farm but when the squire of the farmstead learns of her past he throws Anna out into the snow. His son, the sensitive hero, then rescues her from an ice floe as it's about to take her over a waterfall. North Country is Victorian melodrama in feminist workduds: the valiant hero is now Josey's lawyer and abusive discovery the waterfall.