Introduction

THIS VOLUME is one product of the conference, “Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History.” Held at the University of Calgary in June 2002, “Unsettled Pasts” was the largest conference yet devoted to the history of women in western Canada, and the first major conference to emphasize comparative and transborder histories of women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. Ninety-five presenters and seventy-five delegates shared ideas and conversations across boundaries of national citizenship, age, and profession. Participants represented the generations of scholars who developed women’s history and women studies beginning in the late 1960s through the most recent generation of feminist historians. The presentations covered a variety of disciplines and combined scholarship with personal experience, art, and activism. It was a multi-national gathering, with participation from the United States, Canada, and Britain. As participants exchanged ideas, perspectives, and e-mail addresses, “Unsettled Pasts” crackled with the energy of new connections.

The conference sparked new comparisons and collaborations, and it generated two anthologies. The first volume, Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History, edited by Sarah Carter, Lesley Erickson, Patricia Roome, and Char Smith, focuses on the Canadian prairie provinces and British Columbia.¹ That book was inspired, as was the conference, by the desire to represent women’s histories during the 2005 centennials of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This volume is inspired by a second goal of the “Unsettled Pasts” conference: to generate conversations that would link and compare the histories of the women of western North America and the women whose journeys crossed the borderlands of the Canadian and American Wests.

In this anthology, sixteen articles are arranged topically to suggest connections and comparisons among the experiences of women in the western United States and Canada. Eight of the authors are American, seven are Canadian, one is British. They include a number of “founding mothers” of western women’s history, a number of young scholars in the early stages of their careers, and all the academic generations in between. We carried this cross-generational conversation forward as we collaborated to edit this volume. Sheila McManus represents younger scholars who are forging new transnational approaches to the borderlands of race, gender, and nation. Elizabeth Jameson has studied and taught women’s history since the early 1970s and helped organize the first conference on western women’s history, the Women’s West conference, held in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1983.² McManus is a Canadian who has lived and researched in the United States. Jameson, a U.S. citizen, has lived in Canada since 1999 and is a permanent resident, a status that illustrates the complexities of nationality and identity that many authors explore in this volume.

Seven of the articles are about women who emigrated from one country to the other, or compare women of the two nations. One aim of the “Unsettled Pasts” conference, and of this volume, has been to stimulate more explicitly comparative and transnational scholarship. Histories that cross national borders are still too rare, largely because most historians have been trained as historians of particular nations. We have sought in this volume to suggest the promise of comparative and transnational approaches both through the essays that explicitly employ these perspectives, and by grouping articles topically to suggest comparisons and the potential of comparative and transnational frameworks. The articles, and the topical pairings, explore the meanings of place and nation in women’s histories, adding further depth and complexity to the new scholarship on western women in Canada and the United States.

During the 1970s and 1980s, historians in both countries increasingly researched and wrote women’s histories, as more women became professional historians and as the women’s liberation movement supported the development of knowledge by and about women. Women’s historians wrestled with national histories that marginalized women, and with stories of western settlement that showcased a stock array of male characters. In histories of the U.S. West, these characters might be cow-boys, prospectors, mountain men, desperadoes, soldiers, or intrepid explorers. In Canada, they might be explorers, fur traders, voyageurs, or Mounties. Later, the casts would expand to include pioneer farmers, railroad entrepreneurs, and mining magnates. Sometimes a stereotypical woman might flit briefly across the pages: a reluctant, lonely pioneer, dragged west against her will; a bedraggled pioneer helpmate; a whore with a heart of gold; a helpful native woman, who, like Sacagawea or Charlotte Small, guided the newcomers through an unmapped western landscape. Native peoples tended to appear as assistants or as barriers to be overcome. Otherwise, the actors were not only overwhelmingly male, but also overwhelmingly white.³

The first western women’s histories added women to these all-male casts. Historians of western women, in both countries, emphasized that race, class, and colonial relationships distinguished the historical experiences of women in the North American West. Sylvia Van Kirk’s path-breaking Many Tender Ties demonstrated that aboriginal women were essential, economically and socially, to the Canadian fur trade and to the formation of a unique fur-trade society.⁴ In the United States, Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller’s “The Gentle Tamers Revisited” set the agenda for a multicultural history of women in the American West.⁵ As scholars in both countries added women to existing histories, the stories of western settlement became more complex, conflicted, nuanced, and interesting.

The “Unsettled Pasts” conference emphasized a new category to add to these complex contingencies of gender, class, and race: the nation itself. Instead of assuming that a Canadian white settler woman or a native woman in Canada probably had a life that was a lot like that of a white settler woman or native woman in the United States, we asked how comparable the historical experiences of Canadian and American women of similar backgrounds and status really were. How did separate national policies that governed native peoples, property ownership, intimacy, immigration, and citizenship affect women of different races and classes? How did the histories learned in school and the different ways two nations told their national pasts affect the ways we envisioned women’s histories and identities and our respective Wests?

Those histories differed in important respects. The United States expanded westward from its birth as a nation. Britain relinquished its land east of the Mississippi River to the new nation after the American Revolution, in 1783. Within seven decades the United States had claimed all the land to the Pacific Ocean, acquiring it through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Treaty of Oregon with Britain in 1846, the Mexican-American War, which claimed the northern third of Mexico in 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. It then purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, and annexed Hawai’i in 1898. An ideology of “manifest destiny” justified the enormous land grab that indelibly wrote westward expansion into U.S. history and imagination.

The formation of Canada and the process through which it claimed its western provinces was significantly different. The United States became a nation and colonized its West much earlier than Canada. Almost a century separated the U.S. Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776 and the Confederation that formed the Dominion of Canada in 1867. The colonies that became Canada were often very isolated from one another, did not like each other very much, and did not unite to wage a common revolutionary war. Many late-nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadians embraced and celebrated their British roots and British culture, while American historians sought to explain what, besides a war, made their country different from Europe.

United States history and identity were linked, from the beginning, to westward expansion, and to Americans’ encounters with a westward moving sequence of frontiers. The colonies to the north had much more modest territorial aspirations until well into the nineteenth century, before which European interest in western Canada consisted largely of the economic interests of the fur trade, directed from London by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). British, Scottish, French and, later, Canadian and American fur traders operated in the West from the seventeenth century, forging working partnerships with aboriginal peoples. As an opening chapter in the history of European Canadian enterprise, the fur trade started the Canadian narrative in the West, while U.S. history was generally written as starting with the British settlements at Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620, and moving west from the Atlantic coast. Yet in U. S. histories, innovation, change, and the national character were all forged on the westward edges of an expanding nation. In the traditional Canadian histories, innovation and development were directed from metropolitan centres and authority rested in “central” Canada (meaning southern Ontario and Quebec, or even more narrowly the quadrangle of Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City), which was in turn governed by European markets and political allegiances.⁶

The histories of western settlement followed different timelines and trajectories in Canada and the United States. Canada claimed its western territory later, gaining title in 1869 to the huge territory claimed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The new federal government created the province of Manitoba in one corner of this territory in 1870, followed in 1871 by the province of British Columbia. Most of the western U.S. states were established by 1890, when an unbroken line of states lay along the United States-Canada border. Not until 1905, when Alberta and Saskatchewan were formed, was there an unbroken line of western provinces. The last U. S. territories to achieve statehood lay along the southern border and outside the limits of the contiguous forty-eight states: New Mexico and Arizona achieved statehood in 1912; Alaska and Hawai’i in 1959. In Canada, north of the prairie provinces and British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Nunavut retain territorial status.⁷ The North, and not the West, has often defined the frontiers of Canadian expansion and its limits.

Borders and regions also operate differently in our histories. U.S. historians have paid more attention to the border with Mexico than to the Canadian border, and a whole school of history has explored those borderlands since the 1920s.⁸ In popular U.S. imagination, the border between Mexico and the United States separates Americans from darker and poorer people who speak a different language; it appears as a line of cultural and social demarcation that coincides with national sovereignty. In Canada, the U. S. border has marked national identity in similar ways, functioning as a barrier against U.S. cultural and economic hegemony, separating Canada and Canadian culture from the United States.⁹

The border between Canada and the United States was mapped in several different stages, and then established through practice. Thomas Jefferson originally suggested the 49th parallel as a northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1818, the United States negotiated with Britain to establish the northern border at 49^° north latitude as far west as the crest of the Rocky Mountains. West of there, however, the Oregon Country stretched from the northern border of Spanish/Mexican California to the southern border of Russian Alaska at 54^°40’ north latitude.¹⁰ Britain and the United States agreed not to dispute the ownership of this vast territory, but to share “joint occupation” and defer drawing its boundaries. The joint occupation lasted from 1818 to 1846, a unique arrangement in the history of North America.

In a messy stroke of timing, the question of who owned Oregon resurfaced just before the United States entered a war with Mexico in 1846. The question was particularly messy because by the 1840s the Pacific Northwest had become a complicated meeting ground. The joint occupation had seemed a good idea at first because almost no Europeans lived in Oregon Country anyway. But traders, missionaries, and farmers soon eyed the territory. Home to many different native cultures, Oregon Country became the westernmost outpost of the HBC fur trade empire. Rival traders from the United States also moved into the region. The first American missionaries arrived in the 1830s, and then, in the early 1840s, Americans began heading west on the Oregon Trail to claim fertile agricultural land in Oregon.

American expansionists advocated establishing the border at 54^°40’ north latitude. Chanting “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” they elected James K. Polk president in 1844, and the new president quickly notified Britain that he would not extend the joint occupation of Oregon country. But despite his supporters’ slogans, Polk could not fight a war on two fronts, and so, as he prepared for war with Mexico, he quietly began diplomatic negotiations with Britain. In June 1846, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon establishing the border west of the summit of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel, with a jog around the tip of Vancouver Island to place it under British sovereignty.

The border between British North America and the United States remained porous, and was not in fact surveyed, marked, or mapped for many years. The North American Boundary Commission surveyed the border west of the Rockies beginning in 1858. The portion of the border from the Great Lakes to the Rockies was not mapped until 1872–1874.

The lines that divide nations raise questions central to this volume. How do people’s individual histories, or the histories of daily social life, connect with the histories of nation states? How do we link the histories of nations to the histories of cross-border migrations, to the people and economies and ecologies that traverse national borders? How do we respect the differences inscribed in national and social boundaries, yet challenge the inequalities of power and privilege they also erect? Crossing the boundaries of the national histories we know, like crossing social or class or racial boundaries, involves entering unfamiliar territory where all sorts of assumptions may be challenged, including unexamined assumptions about gender, history, and the nations to which we offer allegiance. Choosing to step across those lines means giving up the power of the familiar.

The “Unsettled Pasts” conference, and the articles that appear here, build on a generation of scholarship that questioned the categories and assumptions that wrote women out of history. Those assumptions privileged elections and warfare over grassroots activism, public affairs over daily experience, powerful individuals over “ordinary” people. History as a professional discipline developed with the rise of the nation state, and until quite recently historians assumed that nations were the primary and proper subjects of history.¹¹

We want to emphasize, then, that all of the categories of analysis used in this volume are historically constructed. Gender, race, class, and nations themselves have been understood and created in specific ways in different times and places. They all involve social relationships, among women and men, people who look different to one another, among citizens of the same country, among people with unequal access to resources and to power. As with all relationships, the behaviors of the participants change what happens, and what it means.

The key analytical concept for women’s historians is gender, which is socially constructed depending on how different cultures imagine and interpret differences between men and women. Gender roles are therefore historically and culturally specific, changing and changeable. For example, in some American Indian cultures women were in charge of the agricultural production and it was considered demeaning for men to be involved. By contrast, in the Canadian West in the late nineteenth century the highest form of white masculinity was to be a farmer, clearly distinct from and superior to effete urbanites or “nomadic” Natives, and women’s participation in such labour was considered inappropriate except when absolutely necessary. In the American West at the same time, a man who farmed would be considered manly, but perhaps less masculine than a soldier or cowboy, precisely because he was more likely to have a family, and thus to be more “tied down” and less a “rugged individual.”

The word “race” is used to denote both a biological construct and a cultural construct, a way of imagining differences in status and capacity based on skin colour and physical appearance. Race operates socially and historically as people assign meaning and construct power relationships based on these perceived differences. First Nations and American Indians, and people of African and Asian descent have, like women, organized to challenge limiting legal and social constraints, and to alter perceptions of the meanings of race, thereby changing relationships of power historically constructed among people of different “races.”

Even the physical and cultural inheritances often associated with “race” have changed constantly in new historical circumstances. Nowhere was this more evident than in the North American Wests, where the first European immigrants were often overwhelmingly male. On the resource frontiers that first drew European men in search of furs, gold, or silver, an invasion of male newcomers interacted with native peoples, entering into exchanges with native women that were intimate and sexual as well as economic. Intimacy generated new peoples—métis, mestiza/o, mulatto—for whom race was a messy and complex process of historically defined identities, limits, and possibilities.¹² The complexity of race is illustrated by the acceptance of Métis as a distinct identity in Canada, whereas in the United States, Métis became Indians, Mestizo/as became Mexicans, and Mulattos were considered Black.

These racial terms raise cautionary flags to historians of our respective Wests. Racial and ethnic terminologies, like concepts of race and ethnicity, are historically and culturally specific, and different terms are appropriate for particular times and contexts in Canadian and U.S. history. In Canada, the preferred terms for native peoples are First Nations or Aboriginals; in the United States, they are American Indians or Native Americans. Because the United States did not recognize Métis as a category, Métis who moved to the United States might be assigned a tribal identity, and be considered, for instance, Turtle Mountain Chippewa. In the United States, the terms Hispanic, Mexican, Spanish American, Mexican American, Tejano/a, California/o, Chicana/o, and Mestizo/a may refer to people of similar heritage; the terms have regionally and historically specific connotations. This volume includes a range of terms that are historically and culturally appropriate, and both Canadian and American spellings. We have elected not to edit authors’ terminology or spelling preferences because the choices to use neighbour or neighbor, labour or labor, Indian or Aboriginal will alert readers to cultural subtleties and differences.

In contrast to gender and race, class in North America has been more easily imagined as a social and a historical relationship, as many people were drawn here from other continents specifically to improve their economic opportunities, and thus to alter their class status. Yet transplanted class assumptions affected the policies that encouraged western development, including the process of claiming and allocating the land. A British system of class and inheritance that privileged the eldest son in wealthy families sent many younger sons to the Canadian West, to make their fortunes on large cattle ranches. In both countries, land was allocated to homesteaders in 160-acre parcels, in exchange for working the land and improving it for a specific period of time (three years in Canada, five in the United States). But in the United States, women could file for land in their own names if they were single or the heads of families. The situation was much more restricted in Canada, a reality that sparked a southward migration of Canadian women homesteaders.¹³ And while 160 acres might promise economic independence for some women, those homesteads represented great losses for native women. For them, the institution of reservations, reserves, and private family homesteads meant the loss of communal gardens, hunting territories, and of indigenous understandings of property, community, and marriage. As these examples suggest, the processes of class formation throughout North America were always historically connected to processes of national expansion and state formation that established relationships of race and gender as well.

Just as women crossed the 49th parallel to claim homesteads, the pulls and pressures of gender, poverty, or race prompted many other back-and-forth migrations across the border.¹⁴ Many Metis and Cree fled south after the failed rebellion of 1885. Many African Americans fled to Canada to escape slavery and racism. Many people came to western North America fleeing poverty or religious persecution. Germans from Russia, Mennonites, Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Jews all settled in the North American West. They found somewhat different opportunities, depending on when they migrated, what they fled, and where they settled. Canada sometimes permitted the formation of a few ethnic colonies called “bloc settlements,” while in the United States people could form an ethnic enclave only by filing on adjacent quarter sections of land. The effects were somewhat different. Ethnic colonies preserved customs, languages, and cultures, and deliberately kept their people isolated from other Canadians to a greater or lesser degree. The U. S. policy undermined ethnic cultures and often isolated immigrants from others who shared their background, while supporting greater assimilation. As these few examples illustrate, national policies and the border itself participated in the process of creating specific western communities and possibilities for women and men of different races, classes, religions, and national origins.

The social and cultural complexity of the North American Wests prompts us, too, to voice our regret that this volume does not represent the full diversity of western people and their pasts. No volume could. This book reflects the state of a field in its infancy, and its silences and omissions should be noted as calls for future research and scholarship. No articles follow the histories of First Nations or Indian women much beyond the fur trade. The racial and cultural diversity of neither West is fully represented in these pages. There is no attention to twentieth-century migrations, to the differences in immigration policies and foreign policies that attracted immigrants from the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, India, China, Vietnam, Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, Lebanon, or Iraq—to name some of the origins of recent immigrants—to either the Canadian or U.S. Wests. Nor is there sufficient attention paid to what the West offered women of different sexualities, or about relationships among women of different classes and cultures. There is much more to be done. For starters, we need to incorporate the histories of native women throughout our historical narratives, so that they do not appear as barriers to be overcome by colonial expansion who then fade from the narrative. We need to envision the history of social relationships always from the multiple perspectives of the people who enacted them.

International migrations, differences in local economies, class and race, gender and nationality—all this complexity makes the history of the North American West much richer, much messier, and much more interesting. We have only just begun to consider what regions themselves might mean when constructed from women’s particular perspectives, and what national identity meant for all the various women who settled the U. S. and Canadian Wests. Did the West look different viewed from a sod house or earth lodge than it did astride a hunter’s horse, or behind a plow? Did it look different from the perspectives of a miner toiling underground and the boarding house keeper who prepared his lunch bucket? What do the West Coast and the Great Plains have in common? What social boundaries, what geographies might map different people’s Wests?

These are huge questions and this volume does not pretend to answer them. We do, however, map some of the lines that have distinguished women’s lives throughout western North America and some of the territory that some women shared. We chronicle some of the stories of how women helped draw the lines that divide people and nations, and initiated other efforts to bridge them. This volume takes a significant first step toward framing important questions and comparisons.

The articles address a series of topics. We begin with two essays by the editors of this volume, which originated as plenary addresses at the “Unsettled Pasts” conference and that frame some of the challenges and promises of transborder histories. In Section Two, two “founding mothers” of western women’s history, Susan Armitage and Sylvia Van Kirk, imagine how the history of one transnational region, encompassing the states of Oregon and Washington and the province of British Columbia, might be written from the perspectives of gender and race. In Section Three, Jean Barman, Molly Rozum, and Joan Jensen address how the stories of individual western women are embedded in particular western places, and how their stories in turn might alter the stories of their Wests. In Section Four, Helen Raptis and Margaret Jacobs explore how women educators worked to push the boundaries of race, using one of the few accepted professions for women as an arena for social activism. In Section Five, Char Smith, Nora Faires, and Cheryl Foggo explore the very different experiences of three very different groups of women who immigrated across the 49th parallel: prostitutes, wealthy American women of Calgary’s business elite, and African Canadians. Next, in Section Six, Laurie Mercier and Cynthia Loch-Drake explore class through the experiences of women who were involved, as workers and as wives, with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, a union that played a significant role in both Canada and the United States. Finally, in Section Seven, professors Margaret Walsh and Mary Murphy discuss the challenges they have faced and the strategies they have employed in England and the United States to teach the comparative history of women in the Canadian and U. S. Wests. Each section is preceded by a brief introduction that suggests conceptual and comparative issues.

One Step Over the Line is just that: a first step across the line that has divided the histories of women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. These articles take a giant first step to begin exploring what links and separates our histories, as women of different races, sexualities, classes, and backgrounds; as Canadians and Americans. We are stepping into unfamiliar territory. We cannot build bridges across unmapped divides.