Sarah Carter

Lesley Erickson

Patricia Roome

Char Smith

This collection stems from a recent conference at University of Calgary that included some of the most established names in the field of women's history in the US and Canada, as well as younger scholars, activists in the Aboriginal community and in farm women's organisations, volunteers in historical societies working to preserve women's voices, family and genealogical researchers, film-makers, a poet, a playwright and many others. Designed to generate writing and research about the West through women's eyes, the central goal of the conference was to spark dialogue across boundaries, whether geographic, cultural or disciplinary. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section discusses the role of women in history as community builders and cultural preservationists, and the second section is concerned with gender history in numerous disciplines such as history, education, nursing and communication studies. This collection highlights the extent to which Western and women's history remains a contested or unsettled terrain and argues that the greatest strength of historical analyses that take sex and gender into account is their ability to complicate and consequently transcend regional myths and frontier legacies that emerged out of imperial and masculine priorities and perspectives.

Reconceiving the West Through Women's History

Unsettled Pasts

Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Erickson’s analysis of these cases shows that, rather than a desire to protect, official responses to the most intimate or violent acts betrayed an impulse to shore up the liberal order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones draws prairie Canada into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building.

Lesley Erickson

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