The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier, 1880-1930. Rev. ed.

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Eliane Silverman had the excellent idea of finding out directly about
the lives of women in Alberta from the beginning of settlement in 1880.
In 1976, when she began her work, many of the earliest settlers were
still alive. She interviewed 150 of them and in The Last Best West
presents the results. The book is organized thematically into chapters
titled “Migration,” “Girlhood,” “The Household World of
Women,” “Communications and Connections,” and “Towards
Community.” The excerpts are sometimes too short, but the introductory
material scattered throughout is lucid and well written.

What Silverman conveys best is a sense of time, and of times changing.
For girls in the early days of settlement, learning obedience was
important and doing chores vital. As for marriage, women expected it to
be “a working partnership,” with children the expected outcome. Of
the endless round of household talk, one of the women says, “[Y]ou
just had to keep going.” What many of the memories do not convey
particularly well is a sense of place. Evidently some of the women
“went out to milk fourteen cows and separate the cream by hand,” but
this was happening in rural Ontario as well (cows were milked by hand in
rural Ontario until hydro arrived there after World War II).

Nor are ethnic differences very profoundly dealt with. Such comments as
“I missed Norway very much at first” and “Many times when I
arrived from Germany I wanted to go back” could easily reflect the
feelings of women settlers in other provinces. One gets the impression
that ethnic differences were not of great importance if the language
barrier could be surmounted, and that, in fact, “community tended to
over-ride ethnic differences.” Good news, if true.

All in all, this little book is a useful reminder of times past; at
least one schoolteacher’s memories form an admirable period piece.