SOURCE: A review of Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, in Contemporary Sociology,Vol. 20, No. 2, March, 1991, pp. 236-8.

In the following review, Steinberg offers positive evaluation of Holding the Line.

Occasionally we look beyond the myopic confines of academic writing, and find a book that enriches our understanding of the phenomena we study. Holding the Line is just such a volume.

Ostensibly this is a chronicle of the role of miners' wives (and female miners) in the eighteen-month strike against the Phelps Dodge mining company. Foremost, however, it is a story of women's empowerment and of the struggles and triumphs of a collective transformation. The strike, conducted from June 1983 to December 1984, was waged by copper miners and smelter operators in several mining communities in southern Arizona in reaction to Phelps Dodge's insistence on wage and benefit reductions and the dissolution of pattern bargaining...