The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier 1880-1930

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

In the mid-1970s Eliane Silverman set out with a tape recorder to interview women who migrated to Alberta prior to 1930. Her initiative was rewarded by 150 interviews which rescued from oblivion the voices of surviving pioneer women of the Canadian frontier. Most women went west reluctantly. “So it was a great sacrifice on the woman’s par,” one informant concluded. “It was the call of the west for the men.” The “last best west” was indeed a man’s frontier but, as Silverman eloquently documents, women were there too, cooking, washing, teaching, nursing, nurturing, and reproducing not only their children but their own culture. Silverman’s questions, both open-ended and specific, elicit a chronology that runs from girlhood through marriage and old age, from reluctant migration to tentative community rather than from the familiar political categories of the Age of Macdonald and Laurier to the Great War and Depression. Echoing women’s interpretation of their own experience, Silverman abandons the individual story for what she calls a “collective autobiography,” focusing her chapters on themes such as courtship, contraception and childbirth, household work, and paid labour. This approach has advantages, the most important of which is the fleshing out of women’s concerns which are so often ignored by historians searching only for the masculine vision of the frontier experience. There are also disadvantages to this approach, most notably the blurring of class and cultural differences so apparent in such studies as Susan Jackel’s A Flannel Shirt and Liberty (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982). Nevertheless, there is a feminine justice in the fact that household labour commands a whole chapter while politics is buried in the last chapter, “Toward Community.” Silverman’s sensitive treatment of her material gives oral history a more substantive framework than is often the case. It is regrettable, however, that the reader’s appetite, once whetted by this raw stuff of history, is not rewarded with a bibliographic essay revealing the theoretical and regional research that informs Silverman’s analysis and that must inevitably lead to a veritable banquet.