Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the