One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Texts.

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University and the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario.

This collection of articles is one of two anthologies that have emerged from a conference held at the University of Calgary in June 2002 entitled “Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History.” The intent of this collection was to begin a dialogue about the lives of women in both the Canadian and American Wests that would hopefully lead to a comparative analysis of the lives and activities of the women who lived and worked there. The articles are by well-established Canadian and American feminist historians such as Sylvia Van Kirk and Joan Jensen, but also by lesser known women who are studying the lives of western women.

The various authors cannot be said to be doing comparative history, but there is an effort underway here to attempt to answer some important questions about western women in both the United States and Canada and to contrast their lives at a particular time in the history of the two countries. For example, should we assume that a woman who settled in the American West experienced similar circumstances as a woman who immigrated to the Canadian West? In fact, we need to ask how the differing national policies that governed Native peoples defined women’s lives, and how property ownership and so on impacted the lives of women in the two countries. These questions need to be answered, but at the same time it must be kept in mind that the American West was largely settled before the British began moving west in the northern part of the continent.

The book is divided into six sections and covers such diverse topics as prostitution and union issues. As well, the role that women such as Edith Lucas played in the development of public education in British Columbia in the early 20th century is outlined.

This is a wonderful and enlightening collection that includes numerous pictures, and the articles will fill in many gaps in our knowledge about Canadian women’s history and provide a beginning to a comparison of western American and Canadian women’s lives.