When the company began bringing in workers to replace them, striking miners lined up at the mine gates in protest. A few days later, when Phelps Dodge won a court injunction barring the miners from assembling at the gates, women strike supporters began holding mass pickets of their own. When the National Guard and riot troops from Arizona's Department of Public Safety (DPS) were summoned to occupy Clifton and Morenci, no one expected the strike to last much longer. The women organized rallies, pickets and more rallies. They were tear-gassed and arrested. They swore and screamed and sometimes threw rocks, and always they showed up for the picket. Thirteen months later, when they were still on the line, a DPS officer remarked, in what was to become the most famous summation of the strike, “If we could just get rid of those broads, we'd have it made.”

But intrepid they were. For eighteen months, between June 1983 and December 1985, women from the tiny mining towns of Ajo, Clifton, Douglas, and Morenci, Arizona, defied propriety and cultural norms to demand justice, fairness, and decency from the company that ran their lives, Phelps Dodge (PD).

Predominately Mexican-American, these feisty women—many of whom had never before been to a meeting, spoken publicly, or questioned authority—took to the streets and union halls to defend their way of life and clamor for adequate wages and benefits. In the face of Phelps Dodge's intransigence, they railed against the company's demands and exhorted the bosses to recognize their need for equitable recompense. Resistance to their efforts was fierce. The National Guard invaded the four towns, families were evicted from company-owned housing, and individuals were threatened by PD-hired thugs. Soila Bom was jailed for “harassment” after she called a former friend a scab. Although the charges against her were eventually dropped, “being legally in the right did [strikers] no more good than if they had been pedestrians run down in a crosswalk,” writes Barbara Kingsolver in her eloquent, inspiring history of the strike, Holding the Line.

Arizona, Kingsolver reminds us, is one of twenty right-to-work states, giving employees in unionized industries the right to refuse to join the bargaining unit and allowing employers to ignore picket lines, union jurisdiction, or the sanctity of a striker's job. And, given the climate of the early 1980s—the air traffic controllers union, PATCO, had been broken and Greyhound strikers had been forced to concede major contractual losses—the women, and the miners themselves, knew they were facing an uphill battle.

There was a lot at stake. By attempting to bust the union, said Carmina, a member of the Women's Auxiliary, Phelps Dodge was trying to turn back the clock to the days of rampant discrimination. For evidence she brought out a newspaper article describing a brand new PD policy forbidding employees of the company store from speaking Spanish (the preferred tongue of most Clifton residents) either to customers or to one another. “Do you see what I'm saying?” she asked Kingsolver. “The union is the only thing we have that's our own. PD likes to tell us what to do, where to live. But I don't think they're going to run us out of Clifton. This is our home and we are staying, regardless.”

Which is not to say that the thirteen unions on strike against Phelps Dodge always welcomed the women's fire-and-brimstone brand of organizing. When the Women's Auxiliary invited United Steelworkers of America insurgent Ron Wiesen to Arizona, many male unionists felt the Auxiliary had overstepped its bounds and a rift developed, pushing both groups to address questions about female autonomy and sexism before things were patched up.

“These were women,” writes Kingsolver, “raised under the dictum of ‘speak when spoken to,’ and it had taken months for some of them to gather the nerve to express their opinions in their own Auxiliary meetings. Some were still uncomfortable expressing their opinions at the family dinner table. Now they were venturing into the great wide world and standing up before the multitudes.” Harnessing their fears, the women began speaking publicly about their strike and PD's despicable anti-union tactics. Before church groups and labor federations in other cities, at college campuses and on street corners, the women told the truth as they saw it. “Some had the full support of their families, while others were fighting in several war zones at once, but they all kept going,” writes Kingsolver. Many were divorced in the process; for having taken steps toward self-actualization and assertion, there could be no return to prior domestic arrangements.

And in the end individual growth is what mattered. For although the strikers and their supporters won many a moral victory, they lost the war. By the end of 1985, the company's mining and smelting interest in Arizona—once the youthful, healthy giant among the state's industries—was an ailing skeleton. Phelps Dodge had sold a part interest in the Morenci operation to the Sumitomo Company of Japan and had more or less turned its back on the rest of the Arizona mines. The Ajo plant was closed, and the town of Ajo may as well have rolled up its sidewalks. The countdown had begun for closing down operations in Douglas within the year. … Most of the retirees had stayed in Clifton, and some of the younger families kept up the difficult life of divided households, with one spouse driving to a job in some faraway city.

Tragic? Enraging? A callous and preventable outcome? Of course. But somehow, Kingsolver's portrait of these indomitable women, changed forever by standing their ground and demanding to be treated as serious, intelligent thinkers and doers, makes the book uplifting and heartening.

“Just look at us,” laughs Diane as she tells Kingsolver about her new self-image. “At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies.” Anna concurs. “Before, I don't know what we talked about. Who got married, did you go to the last wedding, who's messing around with who. Now we talk about Nicaragua, about apartheid. This is a change for everybody, but especially for us.”

“Before the strike,” adds Cleo, “I did nothing. I just didn't know there could be anything like this. Before, I was just a housewife, now I'm a partner.”

By linking arms with women strike supporters in Arizona, Kingsolver has presented us with a unique, important look at a history often ignored. Feminism's sweep—in subtle ways changing how women across race, class, and ethnic lines see themselves as shapers of destiny—is, she implies, an undeniable reality.