This is an extremely rich and compelling study. Laurie Mercier adeptly explores the class, labor, and socio-cultural relations of Anaconda, Montana, the smelter town of the more famous Butte. Mercier's work insightfully underscores the importance of gender—in particular, the male breadwinner ideology—in the making and remaking of Anaconda's working-class world. During the early decades of the twentieth century, those prerogatives facilitated the creation of an overt public culture that celebrated and supported Anaconda's working-class community, in particular its male copper mill and smelter workers. Mercier shows how women in the community both challenged and preserved this order. Ultimately this study shows how that ideology weakened working-class communitarianism. That is, the strategy of male privilege shifted from being an asset to a deficit in the changing world of labor, class, and politics in the twentieth century.