One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests

This is the second volume of papers to come out of the "Unsettled Pasts" conference held at the University of Calgary in 2002. The first volume discussed the experience of women in Canada exclusively. For the second, the editors, Jameson (American studies, Calgary University) and McManus (history, University of Lethbridge) have taken the unusual step of comparing the lives of women in the western United States and Canada. The lines they cross are legal, societal and physical. Women crossed the border in both directions. African American women went north for freedom; single white women went south to take advantage of laws that allowed them to homestead in their own names. And Native American women went back and forth according to tradition. Articles focus on individual women, women in work and unions, and frontier experiences. There are also several essays on writing and teaching the history of women in the west. They also make clear the subtle but very real differences between the Canadian experience and that of women in the United States. Co-published with AU Press; distributed by Michigan State University Press. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Elizabeth Jameson holds the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies at the University of Calgary. She was Co-Chair of the "Unsettled Pasts" conference organizing committee. She co-edited The Women's West with Susan Armitage and has published extensively on the histories of western women and the Canada-United States borderlands.Sheila McManus is Associate Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Her book, The Line Which Separates, was co-published by the University of Nebraska Press and The University of Alberta Press in 2005. Currently, she is writing a textbook on women in the U.S. West.