Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West Through Women's History - Softcover

Sarah Carter is the Henry Marshall Tory Chair Professor of History at the University of Alberta. She has written extensively in the areas of women's, aboriginal, and Western history. Aritha van Herk is an award-winning Canadian writer whose work has been acclaimed throughout North America and Europe. Her books include Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere, Restlessness, In Visible Ink, A Frozen Tongue and Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. She first worked with George Webber on the photography book In This Place, published by Frontenac House. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and a professor who teaches Canadian literature and creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Aritha lives in Calgary, Alberta. Lesley Erickson holds a doctorate in history from the University of Calgary. Her research interests include womenas and gender history, western Canadian history, and the history of crime and punishment. Patricia Roome is a member of the Humanities Department at Mount Royal University, where she teaches history and women's studies. Sarah Carter is the Henry Marshall Tory Chair Professor of History at the University of Alberta. She has written extensively in the areas of women's, aboriginal, and Western history. Cheryl Foggo is a journalist, screenwriter, poet, and playwright. She has a particular interest in the history of Black pioneers on the prairies and has written extensively on that subject in books, magazines, and anthologies. She lives in Calgary.

This collection stems from a recent conference at University of Calgary that included some of the most established names in the field of women's history in the US and Canada, as well as younger scholars, activists in the Aboriginal community and in farm women's organisations, volunteers in historical societies working to preserve women's voices, family and genealogical researchers, film-makers, a poet, a playwright and many others. Designed to generate writing and research about the West through women's eyes, the central goal of the conference was to spark dialogue across boundaries, whether geographic, cultural or disciplinary. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section discusses the role of women in history as community builders and cultural preservationists, and the second section is concerned with gender history in numerous disciplines such as history, education, nursing and communication studies.

This collection highlights the extent to which Western and women's history remains a contested or unsettled terrain and argues that the greatest strength of historical analyses that take sex and gender into account is their ability to complicate and consequently transcend regional myths and frontier legacies that emerged out of imperial and masculine priorities and perspectives.