SOURCE: A review of Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 44, No. 3, April, 1991, pp. 585-6.

In the following review, Cobble offers favorable evaluation of Holding the Line.

“Used to be a confrontation and I'd want to cry. Now I can fight back. I'm not going to make any excuses for who I am or what I think.” These spirited words of a female strike-supporter, reflecting a new sense of entitlement and self-knowledge, came in the wake of a disastrous two-year battle between the predominantly Mexican-American copper miners of Southern Arizona and Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. Barbara Kingsolver's new book offers an absorbing blow-by-blow account of the “great Arizona mine strike of 1983,” raising disturbing questions about corporate power and the neutrality of the state in labor-management affairs. Yet, paradoxically, against a backdrop of economic decline, family dissolution, and...