Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

by Barbara Kingsolver

The women tell remarkable stories of their lives and actions.... This book pays powerful tribute to their resolve and passion for economic justice.― Publishers Weekly

Holding the Line , Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard.

"Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Labor, Womens, Feminism, Historical, Politics

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Since 1993, each one of her book titles have been on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and she currently lives in Appalachia. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, the politically progressive Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".

Reviews

[Christy fictional_traits · Rating 4 out of 5]

'I watched lives being transformed in obvious and compelling ways, as women who initially described themselves as 'just housewives' became campaigners, renegades, community leaders, martyrs and heroes'.

Hours away from both Phoenix and Tuscon, Arizona lay three small, insular mining towns effectively controlled by the copper mining company Phelps Dodge. Their power and control thrived upon taking advantage of minorities, gender bias and woeful health and safety practices. However, in these towns of limited opportunities, most employees simply made do, in between 3 yearly contract negotiations. In 1983 though, Phelps Dodge decided there would no negotiations -only be capitulation. This pulled the trigger on a strike that would last for 18 months and ultimately the demise of unions. As men walked off in protest, a court injunction kept them from the picket lines, leaving the women to 'hold the line'. What resulted was a revolutionary change within the community and the women themselves. Women who had previously limited social lives without the presence of their husbands suddenly found a camaraderie and a voice. They found their value in the face of arrests on trumped up charges, guns pointing at them, and tear gas thrown as more than 400 State Troopers and the National Guard converged to quell the turmoil.

Working as a journalist, Barbara Kingsolver covered the action. Beyond the facts of the events, Kingsolver wanted to understand the women so bravely holding the line. What she uncovered was more than just a strike for workers' pay and rights but an entire education and movement, 'This is a change for everybody, but especially us'.

This story will interest non-fiction readers with an interest in social change and labour movements as well as those who follow women's rights and social anthropology in general.

'I didn't invent these women; they invented themselves'.

[Nailya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea that the acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver's writing career started with a non-fiction book about the women of the 1983-86 Arizona Miners' Strike. Kingsolver, a journalist at the time, had initially planned to write a short article covering the strike as it was happening, but ended up visiting Clifton and Morenci for another 18 months, collecting testimonies from the women of the strike during the developing situation. This is the book's first publication in the UK, but it was originally published in 1989 in the USA (which I hadn't realised when I requested the book, I thought it was a new book). It does have a new introduction, contextualising the project 35 years on and giving a sense of Kingsolver's priorities and her unapologetic support for the strike. If you have read the book before, I wouldn't purchase it just for the new material.

This is my first Kingsolver, although I would quite like to get to Poisonwood Bible at some point. I learned some things from this book, but overall, I thought the fascinating material would have shone more if it had been arranged by a more experienced author. Kingsolver is the first to say that this is not a very analytical book, and the introduction recommends some academic studies of the subject. If you want to learn about the strike, I would pick up those. Kingsolver is not very good at telling the story of the strike in an accessible way - by the end of the book, I couldn't even work out what actually, factually happened to the strike and how it ended. I had to google it to realise that the strike essentially failed and had a detrimental effect on trade unions (Kingsolver painted a particular moment at the end of the strike which resulted in massive job losses as some sort of a cathartic victory for the women). Regardless of one's arguments in relation to the strike, the more analytical material could have been laid out much more clearly.

I really appreciated some of the insights, both the author's and the strikers'. The extent of corporate control in these mining towns read like something out of a dystopian satire to me (literally 'Spacers' Choice' energy for The Outer Worlds fans among you, that game is NOT a satire in the slightest). The company is the only employer, they control the monopolist overpriced shops, they control the only avaiable hospitals, and pay the doctors to declare post-injury workers fit the whole lot. Capitalism on steroids. It was interesting to see the changing gender models and behaviours. It was fascinating to see the repetitive refrain of 'we didn't expect this level of brutality and oppression here, in the USA, it is not Russia' (as someone originally from Russia, I am always interested in such comparisons). Kingsolver did quite a good job of discussing Mexican-American, specifically Arizonan, identity, central to the story (a recap - the Mexican-Americans here inhabited this land when it was conquered by the USA, they are not immigrants, and they were displaced from their land and farms, left with no choice but to work for the mines). The book also opens up a window into a world of rapidly internationalising women, whose awareness of the wider world and crises in South Africa and Nicaragua grew as a result of the strikes.

The chapters are sort of chronological, with some thematic analysis built in. I respect that as a structure, but for it to succeed Kingsolver needed to do a bit more work to establish the individual women whose lives she followed as characters (yes, nonfiction books also have narrative structure and characters). As she uses quotes from a large number of women all mixed together, it is hard to get a sense of these women as individuals and connect to their stories. It just becomes a rather repetitive chorus of quite similar-looking testimonies, which I personally got bored of by about the 50% mark. There is absolutely fascinating material in there. It just does not get sign-posted. Although Kingsolver provided a lot of context and representation for the Mexican-Americans she interviewed, far less context was provided for the Indigenous miners. She interviewed some of them, but there is nothing in the book about Indigeneity, Indigenous identity or the issues specific to the Indigenous people (eg their relationship with the Mexicans, descendent from people who colonised them in the first place). I also wish she had interviewed some of the women who supported the company and opposed the strike. She does talk about their movement, but it is completely an outsider's perspective. I appreciate positionality issues here. Kingsolver explains in the introduction that one could not be a 'neutral' observer and gain enough trust to actually obtain the material she obtained, as one's political views absolutely affected the levels of trust in the community. However, I wish she's at least try to provide a deeper picture to understand the strike and all the women of the town better (even if she despises some of them).

Overall, the material is fascinating, I hope Kingsolver deposits the original recordings in some archive. However, the execution could have been more streamlined and better edited,

Thank you, NetGalley and Faber&Faber, for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was Barbara Kingsolver’s first book, written during her work as a reporter while living in Arizona. She covers the 1983 strike at the Morenci Copper Mine where women played a key role. The union workers began striking at the end of their contract with corporate giant Phelps Dodge, and thus began a standoff that lasted a year and a half. The company brought in “scab” labor to try to break both the strike and the union itself.

Kingsolver states in the preface that she personally knew the strikers and was on their side. There are many interviews with women involved in working the picket lines, organizing strike-related events, making food for the strikers, and maintaining morale. Some of the women were employed in the mine and others were there in support of their husbands.

There are many power plays and abuse of human rights documented in this book. The police and National Guard were called in. The situation escalated. The media coverage focused on sensationalistic headlines. It is hard to believe this all took place in the 1980s. It reads as something you might expect in the early days of unions.

One of the main themes is how these women found a sense of empowerment. Barbara Kingsolver uses her strong writing skills in portraying the anger, frustration, determination, and accomplishments of these women. There are probably a few too many interviews and long quotations. It is fairly obvious this is an early work, but definitely shows Kingsolver’s potential, which she has since developed into a successful writing career.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good first book but then she had a great topic. This is very timely and holds up well. The last couple chapters are as true today as 1987 when it went to press. The government and big business are not going to help the little working person out of the goodness of their heart. It's all about money. We have to not believe what we see on TV or the newspapers. Innocent people get arrested all the time and we think, well they must have done something wrong or they wouldn't have been arrested...........the public is manipulated all the time.

[Alina Borger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, aside from being a riveting story, helped me to articulate why supporting the union is an important part of my professional life.

[Jeremi Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible account of community building and a fight against injustice. Shows brilliantly the role of the state and the police and how those conspire with big business against workers. Also, very well written, nicely narrated story.

[Jennifer Severn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth be told, I wouldn't normally pick up a book about a miners' strike in Arizona in 1983. But I'm a huge Barbara Kingsolver fan and have always loved her non-fiction, so I gave it a go.
It was really interesting. She wrote the bulk of it back in the 80s when she was a rookie journalist and covering the strike was an assignment, and she quickly realised that the real story, for her, was the role woman played in the strike, not just supporting the men in the company towns, but changing their own roles - at work, in their families, and in their own eyes.
I'm wondering why it took her so long to publish it - maybe because she used, in the main, real people's names.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Holding the Line (1989) was the first book Barbara Kingsolver tried to write, although her novel The Bean Trees would come out before it. As a freelance journalist in southern Arizona in her early twenties, she found herself tasked with covering the Phelps Dodge copper mine strike, travelling between different mining towns where her Nissan pickup made her immediately conspicuous ('they looked me up and down and asked if I belonged to that little Japanese truck. I replied defensively that it was put together at a plant in Tennessee'). Between 1983 and 1984, workers at the Morenci, Ajo, Bisbee and Douglas mines walked out after Phelps Dodge, unlike other Arizona mining companies hit by the downturn in copper, tried to force pay and benefits cuts. Kingsolver foregrounds the voices of the women affected by the strike - wives of miners who held the picket line after a legal injunction and then the need to search for work meant the men couldn't hold it themselves, but also women who worked in the mines in the face of violent misogyny and, in the case of Mexican-Americans, racism.

Kingsolver does a stellar job of capturing the realities of living in a remote settlement in desert and near mountains, where nobody locks their doors, which is suddenly confronted by 'four hundred armed state troopers, armoured personnel carriers, Huey helicopters, and seven units of the National Guard' in the case of Clifton alone. The women's individual stories of work are often compelling. Mary Lou started in the mine as a powerhouse pumpman in 1978, operating air compressors, blowers and pumps that if handled wrong could make the furnaces explode: the men were no help, so she read a manual to learn the job. Shirley was forced to do the menial job of cleaning ash pits even though she should have been promoted to driving trucks; the foreman told her he sent her there 'so I can have you right under my thumb'. She was badly burned in 1979 after a furnace did blow up when it was fed with damp concentrate (copper ore that's been processed to contain more copper).

Where Holding the Line falters is its ability to tell a bigger story from weaving together all of these small ones. There's no sense of direction, and I found myself completely lost as I tried to determine how the strike had actually played out and what had happened when. It does feel like a lot of shorter pieces strung together, which makes sense given that Kingsolver had been working as a journalist and this was her first attempt at long-form, but it meant that the book didn't hold my attention and I found myself skimming. Maybe this was partly because it felt too much like work to me - the compare/contrast with the British miners' strikes of 1984-5 was fascinating, as well as the close accounts of manual industrial work reminiscent of the research I've done on shipbuilding in postwar north-east England - but I didn't really want to read this for fun. However, I think Kingsolver was still figuring out how to structure a narrative here, and this great material suffers for it. I'm glad to see this published for the first time in the UK, though. 3.5 stars.

I received a free proof copy of this book from the publisher for review.

[loafingcactus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent most of 2026 in an RV park mainly occupied by men who work at the Morenci mine discussed in this book. Starting with this experience and comments directly about the book found at the line below.

The RV park is isolated and cheap, how I came to be here after suffering an economic disaster early in the year. The men, who do not work for the mine but rather a warren of subcontractors, drive an hour each way to their 12 hour shifts. They work for two weeks at a time, then have a week off during which they return to their wives and children. This schedule became a standard mine operation schedule in a mining strike that happened shortly before the one in this book. Until that strike, men could work 26 days straight (for a time women were limited to working 6 days straight but that rule was lifted by equality).

The men transfer between mines stretching across the copper belt from Montana to New Mexico so their homes are somewhere in that region. The kind of women discussed in this book have thus been broken up and displaced. Between staying here and periodically driving an hour away to the closest town with groceries, I have yet to meet a woman miner, mining wife, or girlfriend.

Despite the remoteness of these areas, they are important enough to the United States economy that earlier this year (2026) when our President threatened half the world with war they appeared on maps of potential retaliatory nuclear strikes. (For some idea what that might look like, see Nuclear War: A Scenario.)

No one here mentions the mining strike. None of them are from here, as I mentioned, and none of them work for the mine owner. I only found out about the book because somehow I saw a passing mention that Did You Know that Barbara Kingsolver’s first book was a nonfiction book was a book about a place you’ve never heard of. In this edition of the book, Kingsolver mentions that her book was at the Clifton library but behind the counter.

Last year I read some other books about mining including a very good one about the Santa Rita mine (just a few hours away from the Morenci mine) that I would recommend reading in conjunction with this book. I have not read the book about this strike recommended by Kingsolver, Copper Crucible. All of these can be found on my “mining” bookshelf.

-------------

“This is the fortune of the woman warrior, too frail to defend her nation in battle, but sturdy enough to take her nation’s gunfire in a strike.”

I came to reading this from two books I despised, and the fresh writing was a breath of clean air. Does Kingsolver repeat herself? Perhaps, but as a supreme craftsperson, molding the text this way and that for the best line. One thing she captures is how shocking these events were to their targets in 1982. Yes the US government has attacked its citizens, and in particular its miners, before. But these attacks have been spread out over 100 years across a wide geography, and a wide racial variety. For these woman, mostly Hispanic, this was an extreme shock. These events being seen by others, people calling from across the country because they saw it, was an extreme shock as well.

For us today, acclimatized to a government that attacks its people and with nationwide traditional and social media showing the faces of many victims, this seems from another time, yet it was only 45 years ago. Kingsolver’s descriptions of how these women dealt with these issues one by one as they built to the world we live in now – Will the National Guard shoot our children? If we have a court case such as for flipping them off (juries eventually acquitted every single case), do we carry a bat against a machine gun or do we wave as our protest? They don’t seem to have know of the effects of tear gas as a cause of spontaneous abortion, but they tried to protect pregnant women on instinct and they blame police violence on one child being disabled at birth. The methods of imposing violence on the people are all things we are familiar with now, but they were seeing it for the first time and having to determine in real time how to respond. There were no academics telling them protest theory, it was just them.

They were also facing difficulties at home as wives and mothers. Aside from worrying about their children getting shot, they weren’t necessarily on the same page with their husbands. Kingsolver records a couple discords, including a scab who dropped his wife off at the picket line she was holding regardless of his choices. Kingsolver reports these marriages ended in divorce.

One of those books I despised was a ridiculous book that claimed that poor people couldn’t figure out these answers for themselves. But here were these women, isolated to these towns for generations, figuring out the points that highly educated and connected activists now debate to death in their own meetings, all on their own.

“Berta had never read Karl Marx or the doctrine of ‘from each according to his capabilities,’ but she had a clear notion of what it means to give what you can, accept what you need, and be part of a community that cares for all its members.” p. 190

These women ended up marching in New York City against South African Apartheid and speaking from a stage next to Jesse Jackson. They were observing where their union leadership was getting things wrong and noting on their own that the socialist and communist newspapers had a better analysis of their situation. No one had to study their personalities and match information to them (as the theory that looks down on the poor advises); they knew what they were looking for and they knew how to divide bullshit from useful strategy.

Berta from the town notes that they didn’t have a strong enough organization before there was a need for a strike. She states, “This should be a lesson to all women. Now that my eyes have been opened, I see a lot of people walking around like somnambulists—women who don’t work for a cause because it doesn’t affect them directly. Not doing anything because they don’t need to right now. I way to say to these women, ‘Good grief, wake up!’ Sooner or later this lack of planning is going to come down and bear on them, just like it has with us.” p. 259

The women end up discussing how they came to understand that the United States government that had attacked them was attacking workers around the world. They discuss the difficulty of the shift from respecting authority to teaching their children a different way and expecting their children to never be involved in the US police or the US military. They also discuss the problem at the time of US unions becoming nationalistic just as international workers and in particular Mexican workers were being played off of them and international solidarity was most needed.

So many of these problems from the 1980s, so many of these images of violence, sound exactly like what we are experiencing now. We are the future Berta warned about.

Books mentioned in this book:
Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America
Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History

Selected further books from the bibliography:
Women on the Job by Judith Buber Agassi
The Clifton-Morenci Strike, Labor Difficulty in Arizona, 1915-1916
Labor & copper in Arizona
We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines
Salt of the Earth
Germinal

[Sydney Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and it’s recount of Arizona history. I learned lots of places in my home state that I hold dear to my heart and love that I have a story to connect with this small communities.

[Debby Binns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to this on BBC Sounds - it was interesting! How Barbara Kingsolver started out her literary career on a newspaper reporting on the great Arizona Mine Strike in 1983. This was an area I know absolutely nothing about and found it very informative.

[beccy]

‘for the families who held the line, and those who will have to do it again’ up the working class

[Laura King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ready to throw hands

[Francis Pellow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 by Barbara Kingsolver, has been on my shelf for years. Written in 1989, Kingsolver documents the strike in a few small mining towns in Arizona as people work to keep their unions in the face of Phelps Dodge. I’ve read some of the important novels Kingsolver has written since she wrote this journalistic treatment of a critical movement in labor history. Kingsolver focuses on the women, who really do hold the line. These rural women come from mixed background: Mexican, tribal people and Anglos. They were mostly housewives, but some were workers including in the copper mines. Their stories are amazing, but we see the reality of rural life—small town, few distractions, and few institutions that can promote mobility.

As the women take an active role in maintain the picket lines, it transforms family life—men have to learn to cook and wash dishes. The different roles in the strike—scab or picket walker—create new tensions in family and long terms friendships. Women who support the strike begin to define themselves in new ways and learn as they go along not to trust the government, the media and politicians as they had in the past. As the press lies about their own cause and motivations, they question how they accepted statements like people get arrested because they did wrong and that the press is always right.

Their actions deepen their connections with each other, as they go out to bars to talk and drink. I think they never anticipated the closeness they feel as comrades. Such behavior would have been scandalous before their many transformations. As people outside their community learns about the efforts of Phelps Dodge to hire new workers and crush the union, the women find support in places they did not think possible. Some are pushed into new roles as they speak for their community. This was an era when women were not key actors in unions, so it was a challenge, but they did find much support in among the rank and file. They are able to raise money and win support from other workers.

Kingsolver captures this moment when isolated rural women learn to rethink their own identities and shape new aspirations for their own children, so who were active on the picket line.
Glad I read this book and it did fill in some history for me. The 1980s was a time of many transformations, so it nice to see how participation in union actions opened new doors for many of these women. Some divorces and separations followed, but many stayed with spouses, but on different terms. Yet, as women they all learned. In the end the strike ended in “defeat,” but really a victory as the participants held on to their rights and many were compensated for the injustices they faced. Yet, they learned through struggle and have much to teach the next generation.

[Maximilien Dubois · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent livre que je recommande vivement. Kingsolver suit et raconte une longue grève chez les femmes de villes minières américaine d'Arizona en pleine époque Reagan.
Elle arrive à montrer la combativité et la prise de conscience de ces femmes mineurs ou femmes de mineurs face à tous les pouvoirs qui leurs pèsent : policier, étatique, familial, bureaucratique, le poids du sexisme, du racisme etc.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting story of the role of the women in a small town in Arizona when their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons go on strike.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gripping non-fiction telling of the 3 year Arizona Copper Mine strike and the women who were responsible for 'holding the line' - showing up day after day to the picket lines. Some were miners on strike but the overwhelming majority were the wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters of miners who were enjoined from striking. This was an historic strike, not just because of duration and ultimate success of mining company in breaking the union, but also how it expanded the role of women in labor and led to great permanent changes for the women and their families. “Just look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies.” You could say that these traditional working class 'ladies' had their consciousness raised. Mine certainly was about unions especially but also about how a strike affects the whole family. I learned a lot about mining as well.

Kingsolver elected to write a non-fiction book about the strike, which she had covered as a journalist (in fact this is her first published book, still in print too, and marks her transition from journalist to author), but as stated in the introduction, she felt that the women's own voices told the story more effectively and powerfully. She was right. Mostly Kingsolver brought context - historical, factual, legal -letting the women tell the story in their own voices.

Those voices come roaring off the page, starting around Chapter 3, becoming so close to me that I deeply felt all the emotions expressed, even the pride expressed at the end in what the women had accomplished. It wasn’t the victory they’d expected, she admitted, but it felt better than anything they’d imagined; it felt like respect.

I had to keep reminding myself that this started in 1983, while I was in law school, not back in the 1930s or 1890s. It was a time of the Reagon White House, big business, trickle down economics. PATCO the air traffic controler's union was elimnated by Reagan during a tense strike. The internet was in its infancy and personal computers just started to become common. I'm not even sure car phones, the predecessor to the cell phone, existed. Remote as the 1980s may seem now suggesting that maybe what occured during the copper mine strike was appropriate for the time, the truth is far different.

The 1980s were starting to look like a turning point in America’s labor history, in which unions would be doing all the turning—into dust.

[Karin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was Kingsolver's first book, and the three stars is not so much for her writing, but it's because even though I know it's very important and have studied it, I loathe labour history which is often depressing for me. In the end, just like in this book, big business wins, etc. The company was trouble before it even opened the mines, illegally cutting of water to farmers who didn't know their rights to scoop up their land for song, etc. Also,the media not representing the situation accurately (sadly, this is not at all unsual)--I wonder how differently things might have turned out had the women had smart phones who could post and stream what was really going on, but obviously that was decades away.

That said, there is a lot in this about women learning their value outside of the home (not just inside of it), to speak up and be strong. Kingsolver started off interviewing women for articles and ended up going back so many times she wrote a book; she got past the surface of the story. The edition I read was published in 1996 with an "Introduction to the 1996 Printing" and an Epilogue that gives more.

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

(My book club received free copies from the Publisher in exchange for some reviews)

The women participants of an Arizona mining strike isn’t generally what I would choose as a subject for a non-fiction book, but Barbara Kingsolver is a great storyteller, so I gave it a try.
The book offers the best explanation of the need for trade unions that I’ve ever read, and the description of the control that the mining company exerted over the lives of the miners and their families really shocking.
Some parts of the book were fascinating, like reading about the women who went to work in the mine, and how the strike empowered the picketing women to advocate for themselves in other areas of their lives, but other parts of it were a slog to get through. I also found that the arrangement of the chapters, made it pretty difficult to understand what exactly happened and when and who all of the different women were. Perhaps because of this it felt too long to me.
Overall, an interesting and important story, which I was glad to read about, but a bit uneven.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure why someone would read Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mining Strike of 1983 today unless he or she was a student of Arizona mining history or was trying to understand how novelist Barbara Kingsolver got to where she is today.

Published in 1989, Holding the Line is the story of how miners' wives in two small Arizona towns took up the mantle of their laborer husbands -- a bit like the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution -- and held an 18-month picket line for a union contract that never materialized. It is Kingsolver's first full-length book -- although her novel The Bean Trees came out first. It neatly demonstrates her transition from journalist to novelist.

Kingsolver follows the 18-month timeline of the strike as a storyteller, always through the eye-witness accounts of the women who lived it. This is verbatim recall: energetic, colorful, often unlettered and angry. Boiled down from hundreds of tape recordings, the lengthy quotes are sometimes monotonous, sometimes repetitive. Yet in Kingsolver's obedience to the women's voices, the reader can see the author's development as a champion of the under-served and under-recognized. There is power in moral outrage.

Kingsolver was a 28-year-old part-time science writer for the University of Arizona who was supplementing her income as a freelance journalist when she got an assignment to cover the copper mining strikes against the New York-based Phelps Dodge Corporation. Union contracts at the mines in Ajo and Morenci, Silver City, NM and the smelter in Douglas were up for negotiation.

What started as a newspaper assignment for Kingsolver developed into a book. She returned again and again to record the women's first-person accounts of the strike as it progressed. Ostensibly, the organization of the book is chronological, but as the subject matter is seen through the women's eyes and it is their concerns that dominate the storytelling.

Negotiations over a contract broke down in June 1983 and miners went out on strike. Phelps Dodge began hiring strike breakers almost immediately. In August of the first summer the company got an injunction banning strikers from assembling at the plants' gates. Their wives then took over the picket lines. Their participation brought in thousands of supporters.

It was their Miners Women's Auxiliary that set up a free clinic, food pantry and rallied national and international union support. Their publicity brought in Cesar Chavez, head of the United Farm Workers Union and Ed Asner, head of the Screen Actors Guild to town and a $10,000 contribution from a November 1983 Bruce Springsteen concert in Phoenix to help fund the strikers' free clinic. The women leaders went on nationwide speaking tours promoting the union and the strike.

Before the strike was over -- eighteen months after it started -- the conflict had cost the state of Arizona $1.5 million in Department of Public Safety (DPS) charges, not counting the state's purchase of an airplane dedicated to maintaining order at strike sites . It is amazing what those in power will do to keep it. Phelps Dodge reported losing $20 million for the second quarter of 1984. The company shut down part of the Ajo mine, laying off 450 workers.

In Kingsolver's account, the power brokers -- the state, the legitimate press, even the national union overseers -- either lined up behind the company or had turned a deaf ear to the 13 local unions who supported the strike. Her extensive bibliography at the end of the book shows a wide variety of sources that went into her background for the book. Not a lot of it gets into Holding the Line in a palatable way.

What does come across is that this is basically the story of brown people: The women who are quoted have mostly Spanish surnames. A mother who was always in the home, goes off to hold the line, but not before instructing her husband on how to put their daughter's hair in a ponytail. When another is yelled at by a "scab" to go back to Mexico, she tells him: "We were always here."

I had a special interest to uncovering this piece of Arizona history, having visited a few of the former mining and ghost towns that dot the southern part of the state. For awhile, my husband was on strike as coal miner when he lived in Utah. Together, since moving here, we have visited Ajo, Bisbee and Vulture City. Even living here in Phoenix, we see signs of the city's mining history, on our own North Mountain, and along Dreamy Draw, which got its name for the route mercury miners took back and forth from mine to boarding house.

I have never been much of a Barbara Kingsolver fan. The Poisonwood Bible, which I read, and a NPR interview I heard, in which she touted "living on the land," seemed morally self-righteous.

Perhaps I have sold Kingsolver short. I should give her another try. In addition to her writing and very conscious (and well reported) lifestyle choices, she funds the biannual Bellwether Prize ($25,000) to honor unpublished works that support "positive social change." This is not a bad thing.

Though I saw confusion in how she chose to organize Holding the Line. I appreciate the author's creativity in wedding art to morality. In the meantime, I have put Jonathan D. Rosenblum's Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America on my reading list. It promises to be a more satisfying piece of historical journalism.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know this was an important story to tell, and I love Barbara Kingsolver, so I’m gutted I found it such a slog. Way too long & some really dry parts. The interviews with the women involved were brilliant & truly inspiring, so I’m glad I stuck it out for them alone.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting true story of a group of women who supported the mine workers strike against Phelps Dodge in Arizona in the 1980s.

These women were mostly Hispanic and had been traditionally stay at home wives and mothers. But when their husbands went on strike, they stepped up to support each other and their community. Almost immediately, the strikers were legally barred from striking, so it fell to their wives to hold the line on the strike.

Fascinating and horrifying depiction of a modern company town. Phelps Dodge controlled the local stores, owned all the houses and the hospital, and essentially owned the police and local judges. They had the resources to control the narrative and set out to break the unions in their mines. I was appalled to realize this took place in the 1980 and not the 1920s.

This was one of Kingsolver's first books as she transitioned from newspaper reporter to novelist. In the foreword to the book, she makes the point that she could have written a novel out of this story, but she believed the women's stories deserved to be told as true non-fiction.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea Ms. Kingsolver was like this!!! I read the Poisonwood Bible when I was 13 and I think I read the Bean Trees in high school. This was her first book and it’s an account of an event I had never even heard of. In 1983 workers at Phelps Dodge mines in Arizona went on strike. The miners went on strike pretty much every three years whenever the contract was renegotiated, but this time was different. Most strikes had a Women’s Auxiliary Group, which was a group of worker’s wives who made snacks for picketers and generally provided moral support. During the 1983 strike, which lasted over a year, this group of women held down the fort and ultimately became quite radical. The company and the state colluded in dramatic shows of force including bringing in the national guard and DPS (Department of Public Safety) to occupy the small communities. They gassed people without provocation, they threw people in jail on trumped-up charges, they surveilled and harassed everyday citizens. It is pretty astonishing. I shouldn’t be surprised since it was only a couple years ago that our own city was basically occupied. Still I was shocked at the show of force the state brought on to a very small community fighting for their rights. These women transcended not only the usual role of the Auxiliary group, but their roles as women in the small mining community. Not only is this an incredible story of women’s empowerment, but had explicitly racialized dimensions. Their Mexican heritage and history is inextricable from their struggle. It was inspiring and fortifying and shows how much ordinary people can do when standing together. It also shows what lengths the state will go to suppress dissent.

Why were the women so determined? Most of the women involved in the strike were the wives of miners, but several were miners themselves. They discussed the difficulties women faced on the job and how much the Union protected them. Most of the women had strong pro-union convictions out of respect for their families.. It would not only be a disservice to themselves to accept a weaker contract, but to their fathers and grandfathers. Their forefathers had fought for these protections and they would be damned if they let them slip away. (In 1917 demand for copper was high due to WW1. The miners were angry that they were not getting any benefit from the increased demand and were working harder than ever. They went on strike in Bisbee, Arizona. The US Government rounded up 2,000 strikers and put them in a concentration camp. Most of them never returned . I’ve never heard of this incident. What a disgusting country.)

Additionally, it’s extremely important to note that this community was completely segregated until the late 60s. Mexicans were dedicated to organizing because it wasn’t just about their jobs, they were fighting for their rights in every aspect of life. The fight for integration in housing and schools, for equal pay, for basic dignity was all fought in contract bargaining. “We would negotiate, then the Anglos would come along and say, ‘just sign me too’. The Mexicans fought harder because we were discriminated against–those other guys had all the cushy jobs. After we got the union it got better and better” (17).

“The threat to their standard of living was not just personally dangerous; they saw it as an insult to their ancestors. These tiny isolated downs have steeped for half a century in their own labor traditions and extracted a sense of price that provides their only medicine against hard times. Even for those women who weren’t miners themselves, the union they’d grown up with was a tool as familiar to them as a can opener or a stove. They knew exactly where they’d be without it: living in Tortilla Flats or Indian Town, barred from the social club, the library, and the swimming pool. Living with husbands who broke their backs and spirits for half a white man’s wage…They marched for the union because they knew in their bones a union banner was the only curtain between themselves and humiliation. Being cursed by scabs or the National Guard is a lesser evil by far than the curse of a father’s ghost.” (20).



The Woman’s Auxiliary maintained the picket line and the visibility of the strike, but they also created life-sustaining operations out of nothing to help striking families survive. In the three towns that HTL covers, the company owns EVERYTHING. They buy food in the company store. The company owns their houses. The company owns their utilities. The company owns the clinic they go to. The Women’s Auxiliary organized food drives and community childcare. A company doctor, Jorge O’leary, was fired for being sympathetic to the strike. He set up a People’s Clinic where anyone could get free healthcare. Bruce Springsteen actually donated all of his Phoenix concert proceeds to the clinic! These actions greatly reduced the people's dependance on the company for basic needs. They also planned rallies and actions, to the point where there was a schism between union leadership and the women– they thought the women were becoming too radical and brash.

Most of these women had been housewives all their lives. The women’s domestic skills prepared for them to persevere in the strike. They have organizational skills needed to run a household. They spend all day mediating conflict between family members. They have social skills to talk with people and make them understand the situation. Creativity in making ends meet on limited means. Logistical skills. (109). These skills all transferred into making them excellent organizers, even if they had never read a word of theory. However, being so good at organizing due to those domestic skills ultimately lead many of the women to transcend their domestic role. It was a dialectical transformation: “These women had crossed the Rubicon. What began as an extension of domestic servility became a contradiction of it in the end, mainly because the women had altered their perception of what they felt was important, worthwhile, and within their power to do” (178). Many marriages did not survive the strike because their husbands were resentful at how involved and outspoken their wives had become. Men already felt emasculated by their inability to provide for their families during the strike. It was salt in the wound to see the women out there working harder than anyone else.

Another contradiction arises in their goals for their children. Do you fight for your children to stay here or fight for them to get out of the small town and go to the big city and get an education? It makes sense for a parent to want their child to have more success than they had. But at the same time, so much of the strength of their union relies on their convictions due to family history and identity as union miners. Lately there is more of an emphasis on self-actualization and there’s also this idea that your job shouldn’t be your whole life. I totally agree and think this is a natural reaction to a society that places so much emphasis on money and your job as if your profession is who you are. But the downside to this detachment of identity from work is that it’s difficult to get people to join the labor movement because they have less personal investment in making a job better. Why should I care about unionizing my shitty retail job? This is just a temporary job until I achieve my REAL dreams. If there is no pride in your work it’s hard to care about protecting it. I understand why someone would not want to be a copper miner. And I understand why people would not want to work retail. But people do need to do these jobs, and if the people who are doing these jobs do not care, they are much more easily exploited. I wonder where the children of these women are now. It is really difficult for small towns to survive when their only industry dies, because the kids do not want to stay. It’s especially difficult with the internet now that you can see other ways of life so easily. And who can blame anyone for wanting to move to the big city where there are more opportunities. But it’s sad to read the chapters where the women talk about the pride they have in their small town and community, because they’ve been there for generations. If there is no one to care, the thing dies whether it's a union drive or an entire town. We can’t all go to New York City.

HTL has an example of a town that didn’t have as strong of a sense of ancestral/community obligation and pride. There was a mine near Tucson run by a different company that also had a walkout on the same day as the PD mines. But they accepted a worse contract within 4 days. Why were these small towns able to hold out? Because at the Duval mine, the workers all commuted from Tucson and the job was just a job. In Ajo and Clifton and Morenci, the mine was their community and their history and their families. And everyone there understood that accepting a worse contract would set a precedent for all the other mines and even the whole labor movement. This is a constant carrot dangled in bargaining, where you want to take a deal because it will be good for you in the short term, but you have to think of the precedent it sets for other contracts in your industry. The people in the PD towns understood themselves as part of a larger history.

The past few years have had a wave of unionization campaigns and some of the biggest growth has been in industries that people don’t think of as Real Workers, like baristas and retail workers. This is something that comes up often in organizing– people understand the need for a union in a factory or a coal mine but think service workers are a bunch of latte-sipping babies who love to complain. I am not saying that we have it as hard as miners, of course, but some of the rhetoric the miners faced sounds exactly like this discourse. The unionized miners fought to get 8 hour shifts and to limit days in a row at 14. The scabs work 12 hour shifts for 26 days in a row. Newspaper editorials call the strikers whiny and lazy for only being willing to work 8 hrs a day for 14 days. This proved to me that no matter what people will call you lazy for trying to improve things. If workers before us did not continue to push for better conditions, we would not have the 8 hour/5 day schedule we have now. Some places are changing to a 4 day workweek and workers report increased happiness with no loss of productivity. People push back on that saying it’s sooooo lazy and I worked 6 days a week 16 hours a day with no complaining blah blah blah. Sometimes I even catch myself thinking that 5 days is not actually that bad, but then I think of everything I could be doing if I worked 6 hours a day 4 days a week. I’m not even anti-work, but we do not need everyone to be working this many hours for society to function. This section was important for me to read because it reminded me that things can always be better, and that if you always accept your lot the way it is you’ll never improve and companies will always push as far as they can. They want us to have a chip on our shoulder about how hard things are so that we never try to get anything better!

The media also kept depicting the strikers as greedy and money-hungry. They were not. They had already agreed to a wage freeze because they knew the copper industry wasn’t doing well. Strikers have other important demands like safety and respect. And often the safety of the public is a concern– I couldn’t help but think about the recent Railroad union’s contract that the democrats forcibly pushed through. Workers had safety concerns about corner cutting, but profit is God and then we end up with horrible accidents like the derailment in East Palestine. Union members aren’t trying to be millionaires, if we wanted to be millionaires we would be in very different lines of work. Additionally, as I said before, some contracts can’t be accepted even if they seem good on the surface because of the precedent they will set for other contracts. HTL did a fantastic job of explaining the deeper reasons the miners could not give up on the strike that went further than simple economics.

Why wait until you’re in desperate need of a union to organize? This is another thing that I have found challenging about organizing, is that things are ~ok~ a lot of the time. Sometimes companies do treat their workers fairly, but if something goes south such as say, a global pandemic, or copper prices falling, they will absolutely not give a fuck bout you. It’s very difficult to organize preemptively because people need something terrible to react against. But when it’s a gut reaction it’s not planned out and is not as effective or sustainable as it could be, or in many cases it’s simply too late. This pattern happens over and over from climate change to police violence to school shootings to building stronger levees for a city to union organizing. We all know that there’s a risk of things going wrong, but do nothing until something bad happens, and then there’s only reactionary outrage that can’t be channeled into effective change.

”I see a lot of people walking around like somnambulists– women who don’t work for a cause because it doesn’t affect them directly. Not doing anything because they don't need anything right now. I want to say to these women, good grief, wake up! Sooner or later this lack of planning is going to come down and bear on them– just like it has with us. Three, four years ago we didn’t need anything either, but now we do and we’re caught with our pants down. Think what we could do if we had started right after the last strike and had time to build up our resources, instead of having to earn from scratch everything that we need “ (155).

In the end, the union was decertified and the mines were closed. This was ultimately a major blow to unions in Arizona and the labor movement across the country. It’s extremely discouraging and frustrating. But Kingsolver chooses to focus on the positives and give the book a sort of happy ending because she is doing more of an ethnography of the women rather than a study of the labor movement as a whole. The people viewed the end of the strike as a moral victory. Throughout the strike, PD spent millions of dollars on escorts and security for the scabs. It’s obvious that this wasn’t even about the money or else they could have simply given that money to the workers. It was an ideological battle about control. They wanted to destroy the unions on principle. Nearly everyone who had gotten slapped with bullshit charges had their charges dropped because it was obvious they wouldn’t get convictions in courts. Many people who were victimized by the state filed lawsuits, and many won or settled out of court. But most of the lawsuits were against the state for excessive shows of force; they were not successful in attempts to prove that the state colluded with PD nor were they able to make PD pay. They kept winning moral high ground but materially they were still fucked over. I can’t say I’m surprised or disappointed by the ending, because that’s really what happened. It’s discouraging to think about how much they fought and in a way still lost.

But the gains in empowerment, women’s roles in the community, and simply the knowledge that they could fend for themselves are invaluable. Some of the women who had trouble speaking up at dinnertime go on to give speeches at union halls across the country. They are able to connect their struggle to other struggles around the world: “Before I don’t know what we talked about. Who got married, who’s messing around with who. Now we talk about Nicaragua, about apartheid. It’s been in the news that people are rising up in the Philippines against the Marcos regime, so that becomes the topic of conversion. This is women! This is a change for everybody, but especially for us” (180). It was still a deeply inspiring story about the ingenuity, courage and perseverance of these women. Bargaining has taken a long time and I get fatigued and burnt out just like they want me to, but then I read something like this about people persevering and I feel stronger. So I am incredibly thankful to these women and to Kingsolver for telling their stories.

[Rhiannon Farr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly informative and is certainly a text everyone should read - I had no idea these strikes even happened - and it highlights the struggles faced whilst remaining compelling and inspiring. Love u Kingsolver

[Ashy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was good, but it is a bit niche! I found it interesting in relation to the Freeports that are currently being set up in England (I’m not sure what stage that is at). In the book the whole town is basically owned by the mine - the hospital, the police, workers housing etc which left workers in really bad situations when they needed to strike. An interesting look at a time when Unions were being targeted both in the US and U.K.

[Felix Böhme · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of story we'd all prefer to read under the heading "Once upon a time" than the one that begins, "Listen: this really happened."

But that is exactly the point. It did. In the country where I live, the government, the police, and a mining company formed an open partnership to break the lives of people standing together to protect their families and livelihoods. A steel-toed alliance of state and corporate power arrested hundreds of citizens in a campaign to intimidate the strikers and turn public sympathy against them. 

After it succeeded, these hundreds of charges were found to be so ludicrous, the state quietly dropped every single case. It wasn't the nineteenth century, not some distant banana republic. Ronald Reagan was president, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was on the radio, and citizens had so much confidence in law enforcement, they rallied to the cry of "More Police!" as the answer to most social ills. 

They barely blinked when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese declared for the record that innocent people don't get arrested in America. It struck me as a good time to challenge our tradition of condemning the accused.

And so this is not a novel. It is a cautionary tale. Its lesson is: watch your back. Take civil liberty for granted at your own risk. Trust in leaders who arrive into power by means of wealth, and see what they protect when push comes to shove.

----

The following year, ten other women joined Janie at the Ajo pit.

One of them, Betty Copeland, weighed ninety-two pounds when she was hired as a laborer. While many men gave her a hard time, she found that some of her male co-workers were at first surprisingly encouraging. 

Eventually her father told her why. The men had placed bets on whether or not she would last two weeks. Most of them lost money; ten years later, Betty still hadn't quit.

----

Fina Roman, head of the Women's Auxiliary, expressed similar doubts about truth, justice, and the American Way. "I think this has been a learning process for us. We have always been proud of our country and believed in the democratic system. Try to imagine the disappointment of having had such faith in that system that's turning against us now. We taught our children that if you do right and don't break the laws, the system in place is your defense: you can't lose if you work within that system - you can defend what you think is right, and not be punished for it. But we have been punished, and that's been damaging to the values we tried to instill."

"This town has been here over a hundred years, and for all that time we have been law-abiding citizens who raised our children, supported our town, and produced many valuable, worthwhile human beings. All of a sudden, as soon as we stand to defend what we believe is right, they call us law-breaking animals."

----

"You didn't know where you were going to be when they got you," Berta said. "We had to explain it all to our kids. My son was always worried - my oldest, the ten-year-old. He would ask me, 'How are they going to pick you up? Are they going to give us away? Who's going to take care of us?' I would say, 'You have your dad, and your grandmother.'"

Diane felt especially vulnerable because she was a single parent.

This was the hardest thing - preparing the children for the possibility of her arrest. "We had to discuss it. I told them I might get arrested, and that if I do, it's for something I believe in. I told them I was doing this so they wouldn't have to go through it all again when they were older."

----

"Our cause, this violation of our human and civil rights, is the gravest issue in the state of Arizona. If we don't fight it, what comes next for every man, woman, and child in this state? Now we know what Mr. Paine meant when he said, "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.' Ask any of the homeless or the unemployed. Ask any miner in Arizona."

----

Dr. Jorge O'Leary, a physician employed in the Phelps Dodge hospital at Morenci, had been fired for supporting the strike. A Phelps Dodge spokesperson explained: "He's been expressing sympathy with the union cause, and he's been very critical of the company's hospitalization, medical, and surgical plan." 

But after serving the communities of Morenci and Clifton for twelve years and delivering more than a thousand of their citizens, the Mexican-born doctor was not about to close up shop. He opened what was christened the "People's Clinic" in an old feed market beside the highway above Chase Creek and vowed that no striker would go without medical care. The free clinic was supported by donations from unions and physicians in Tucson, Phoenix, and Chicago - and eventually by Bruce Springsteen, who donated ten thousand dollars in November 1984 from the proceeds of his Phoenix concert. 

The clinic was inspected by Arizona public health authorities and rated "excellent." Not bad for a former feed store.

----

The enthusiasm grew on them. At one time the auxiliary meetings were as efficient as possible, but now they spilled over into prolonged, friendly potlucks. The women looked for reasons to meet more often than once a week. When the union organized a stress workshop and brought in a therapist from out of town, only women attended. "Wouldn't you know it," commented Jessie Tellez. "But when she found out about our meetings, the therapist said, 'You're giving each other therapy and you don't even know it. You ought to meet twice a week." It was the only way they were going to last, and they knew it.

----

"What really got to me," she said after some consideration, "was the questions that the media people asked. When all these people were hurt and tear-gassed, they came here wanting to know, 'What were you doing with children there?' Like it was our fault that the kids got hurt. Well, it wasn't a planned riot, it was a planned picnic! It was a family thing. I told them, 'Look, these kids were invited. The DPS was not.' "

----

"In the old days it used to be that the best thing you could do for your kids was to get them a job with the company. Big favor, right? We're not doing that anymore. We're telling them, 'Don't listen to everything the boss tells you. Big companies like Phelps Dodge, look what they did to your father.' It's a lesson that sticks."

"Maybe in the short run Phelps Dodge has shut us out. But every dog has its day, and I see a buildup of these forces. Companies like this are going to be on their way out. It might not be in my lifetime, but someday. And these formerly alienated groups of people - workers, minorities, women - will be on their way in."

Diane McCormick agreed completely. "So many women have been involved in this strike, you know that the next time around more women will be pro-union. Nothing can be the same as it was before." She smiled and put her hands in her pockets. "Just look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1983 the unions went on strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Mine. I found the description of the strike activities fairly confusing. I nearly stopped reading the book, but am glad I persevered. It is only externally about the strike.

Kingsolver stresses several aspects of the strike that really have little to do with the unions or with the actual strike conditions. First, she provides a wonderful description of life in the small,l mining towns, often towns that were totally company towns. Second, she stresses the importance of the Mexican American culture of most of the miners and workers, and the racial aspect of the Mining Company, the police and the politicians that are involved. And, third, she is most interested in writing about the effect of the strike on the women of the towns – mostly Mexican American women who, for the most part, had traditional female roles (It is confusing that she begins by describing the women who became mine workers). The strike destroys the economy of the towns – there is no other work within 50 to 100 miles. The strike totally changes the way most of the women view themselves and their future. I don’t think the strike had much effect on the racism toward Mexican Americans.

This book was not what I expected. It is nonfiction, based on an oral history, somewhat journalistic approach, and apparently Kingsolver’s first book.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1983, during a global decrease in copper prices, the copper mining industry across Arizona started laying off miners, and implementing wage cuts. The miners unions entered negotiations with the large mining companies agreeing for wage freezes for 3 years, with only cost of living adjustments. 3 agreed, and only one company , Phelps-Dodge held out, and the union decided to strike. Phelps-Dodge’s proposal required miners to accept a freeze in wages with nu cuts, but no inflation adjustments, no healthcare. Barbara Kingsolver was a freelance journalist writing for scientific journals, living in Tucson at the time , and she decided to write about this industrial dispute. Driving back and forth from two minig towns at the frontlines of the strike, Morenci and Clifton ( in her Japanese brand car-a funny incident in the beginning of the book recounts the people of the town looking askance at her foreign car, and telling her that cheaper copper imports were depriving them of their livelihood, and she was turning up in one of those and she defends herself by saying her car was manufactured in America! Her new friends then use the same sentence to defend her when someone else makes the same observation), Kingsolver meant to write a series of articles, but she spent 18 months chronicling this and it instead became her first book, a work of non-fiction. Phelps-Dodge took out injunctions to prevent the men from striking, and the women of Clifton and Morenci manned the picket lines, while some of the men traveled to other towns to seek work, forming what they called the Women’s Auxiliary. Phelps-Dodge brought in a convoy of 150 vehicles through the town, transporting miners from other towns to break the strike, and kept it running for shorter hours with other office workers and non-striking employees-the first time in its history it had ever kept mines open during a strike. The striking workers gathered in numbers outside the gate, and finally Phelps-Dodge agreed to shut down the mine for 10 days ( it required the Governor’s intervention). Striking miners were immediately handed eviction notices-this was a mining town, which meant everything in it was controlled by P-D: the houses, the hospital, the grocery store. Though there was no violence by the strikers, Governor Babbitt was alarmed enough to send in more than 300 armed National Guards, helicopters, and more than 200 additional police, to the town of Morenci ( a town with a population where everyone knew each other by their first names). Kingsolver explores the effect this had on the town, and how the mostly Mexican-American residents dealt with what was probably an invasion ( the border moved to encompass their land). PD brought back the scabs, under heavy Guard, in violation of the agreement. The unions held out though, only for the area to see some of the most devastating floods in its history, with the San Francisco river breaching its banks and destroying houses and businesses. PD refused to pay for reconstruction of striking miners’ houses, and even withheld healthcare. Some of the women recount feeling more fear of the National Guard doing relief work, rather than comfort, with them providing the bare minimum and only the Red Cross actually stepping up. The strike continued, with the women organizing more events around it, a Cinco de Mayo festival as well, that ends up being disrupted by a non-striking worker threatening people with a gun, and in an utterly terrifying scene, hundreds of riot police are brought in with batons and shields, to what was a peaceful celebration with a few picket signs, and began tear gassing and beating people. This event made the front pages of the media though, with them receiving letters of support from all over the world, including the striking coal miners in the UK ( Bruce Springsteen had just donated $20000 to them). Another round of negotiations began, with PD offering even less this time, including a reversal of seniority, so a miner who had 20 years of experience, who had been on strike, would be hired at the same level as one hired the previous week. The miners felt they had no choice but to accept, much to the despair of the women-an event that Kingsolver uses to examine the lack of women representation in the labour movement. Right form the start, women were not allowed to join unions, something that was not rectified enough in the 80s. Professions started organizing in the 70s and 80s that had not earlier, ones where women made up a large part of the workforce-teachers, nurses, among others. There were no women representatives in the Union of Garment and Textile workers, despite making up 90 percent of the workforce. The half a million women Teamsters had no seat at the Union either.
These negotiations fell through, though, when PD started proceedings to de-certify the union, and wanted to allow all the scabs and replacement miners to vote in that-obviously something the unions were against. This went all the way to the National Labour Relations Board, that Kingsolver describes as completely ineffectual ( the current Chairperson was the lawyer who worked with Reagan to break a major ATC strike, that shut down their union entirely), and true to form, all the replacement miners were allowed to vote as well, resulting in the decertification of several unions, and the end of the strike. Copper prices further dropped across the world, with PD then closing several mines, and in a moment of complete irony, one of the women at the forefront of the strike narrates how the National Guard moved in again-this time because they had heard that the strikebreakers and scabs at work were planning an armed attack against the closure of the mines by PD. That was also stopped, and the replacement miners brought in from other towns had to leave. The Women’s Auxiliary are rueful about this vindication of their stance to stay firm for their rights, because even helping to break a strike was never going to ensure that a large mining corporate was going to demonstrate fairness, or good faith. The book makes for quite difficult reading because the labour movement is even more important, and much more beleaguered now. I think I liked this more than her fiction!

[Jeanne Rankin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting account of how women "held the line" in a miner's strike in Morenci, Arizona against Phelps Dodge. Worrisome how the laws that are there to protect us were totally ignored in this strike. It truly sounded like something that would have happened back in the late 1800's to early 1900's, not now. Also interesting was the growth and education of these women who were the backbone of this strike.