Contributors
SUSAN ARMITAGE is Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University and Director of the Center for Columbia River History. She is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Jameson) of The Women’s West (1987) and Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (1997) and a co-author of a widely-used U.S. history textbook, Out of Many. She is currently at work on a history of women in the greater Pacific Northwest.
Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, JEAN BARMAN has taught Canadian educational history at the University of British Columbia. Her Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) won the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Award and the Governor General’s Medal presented by the British Columbia Historical Association, both for best book in British Columbia history published in 2003.
NORA FAIRES teaches history and women’s studies at Western Michigan University. A scholar of migration, she is co-author of Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855–2005 and Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650–1990. She plans to expand her research on gendered imperialism by investigating chapters of the American Woman’s Club established in Canada and in other nations.
CHERYL FOGGO has been published and has produced extensively as a journalist, screenwriter, poet, playwright, writer of fiction and non-fiction, and as a young adult novelist. Her books have received many provincial and national award nominations, including the Governor General, the Blue Heron, the Silver Birch, and the R. Ross Annett. Her most recent play, Heaven, received a national playwriting nomination as well as a Betty Mitchell best new play nomination and aired on CBC’S national Sunday Showcase in 2004. Also an award-winning screenwriter and director, her documentary film The Journey of Lesra Martin won a bronze award at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival. Her journalism has been published in Canadian, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Consumer, Western Living, Legacy, Alberta Views, Alberta Venture, Calgary Magazine, and The Calgary Herald. Ms Foggo was invited in 2006 by the Canadian High Commissions of Jamaica and Barbados to participate in those countries’ Black History Month celebrations.
MARGARET D. JACOBS is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the author of Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (1999). She is currently working on a manuscript, “White Mother to a Dark Race,” regarding white women’s roles in the United States and Australia in the removal of indigenous children from their families to institutions between 1880 and 1940.
ELIZARETH JAMESON holds the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies at the University of Calgary. She was Co-Chair of the “Unsettled Pasts” conference organizing committee, and served on the Steering Committee of the 1983, 1984, 1987, and 2000 Women’s West Conferences. She has published on the histories of western women, western labor, mining, and the Canada-United States borderlands. Her books include two co-edited anthologies (with Susan Armitage), The Women’s West and Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, and All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek.
JOAN M. JENSEN is a Professor Emeritus of history at New Mexico State University. A senior scholar of rural women’s histories, her many books include With These Hands: Women Working on the Land, and Promise to the Land. In 2006, the Minnesota Historical Society Press published her Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850–1925, which received “Honorable Mention” for social/cultural history from the Merle Curti Award Committee of the Organization of American Historians. She is the co-author, with Darlis Miller, of a formative essay in western women’s history, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited.”
CYNTHIA LOCH-DRAKE is completing a doctorate in history at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She developed an interest in women and work in Alberta while living in Fort McMurray during the 1980s and working at the Syncrude oil sands plant, and at the local newspaper.
SHEILA McMANUS is Associate Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Her book The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2005.
LAURIE MERCIER is Professor of History at Washington State University Vancouver (the other Vancouver). She is author of Anaconda: Labor, Community and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (University of Illinois, 2001) and co-editor of Mining Women: Gender in the Development of a Global Industry, 1670–2005 (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005)
MARY MURPHY is Michael P. Malone Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman. She is the author of Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936–1942 (Montana Historical Society Press, 2003), Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–1941 (University of Illinois, 1997), and numerous articles in gender history.
HELEN RAP TIS is an assistant professor in the Education Faculty at the University of Victoria. Her areas of study include educational history, sociology, and policy studies.
MOLLY P. ROZUM is an assistant professor of U.S. history at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a native of South Dakota. Her research focuses on sense of place and regional identity on North America’s northern grasslands.
CHAR SMITH completed a Master’s degree at the University of Calgary with a focus on women’s legal history. This article stems from her thesis research on prostitution in British Columbia. She is currently co-owner of a historical research consulting firm focussing on women’s and First Nations research and litigation management.
Professor Emeritus SYLVIA VAN KIRK has recently taken early retirement from the University of Toronto where she taught Canadian History for almost 30 years. She pioneered courses in women’s history and aboriginal/non-aboriginal relations and has written widely on aspects of early western Canadian social history. Her book Many Tender Ties: The Role of Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada 1670–1870 has become a classic in its field. Van Kirk is now living in Victoria, and her current research projects focus on the experience of HBC/native families as they settled in colonial Victoria in the mid-19th century. She is also branching out into “living” history projects and is helping to develop heritage programming for the Church of Our Lord, Victoria’s oldest church building, opened in 1876.
MARGARET WALSH is Professor of American Economic & Social History in the School of American & Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her recent publications include Making Connections: The Long Distance Bus Industry in the United States (2000) and The American West: Visions and Revision (2005).