One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests

This eclectic and carefully organized range of essays-from women's history and settler societies to colonialism and borderlands studies-is the first collection of comparative and transnational work on women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women's history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History," Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text for pioneering scholars of this emergent, interdisciplinary field.
"We are stepping into unfamiliar territory."
This unfamiliar territory is the borderlands of women’s histories traversing the American and Canadian Wests. Specialists in women’s history, settler societies, colonialism, storytelling, education, and native and borderlands studies introduced by Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus pool their distinct contributions toward forging the very first comparative, transnational collection of its kind.

"We cannot build bridges across unmapped divides."
Sixteen essays arising from the "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History" conference at the University of Calgary comprise this foundational text. One Step Over the Line is not only the map; it is the bridgework to span the transnational, gendered divide―a must for readers who have been searching for a wide, inclusive perspective on our western past.

Contributors: Susan Armitage, Jean Barman, Nora Faires, Cheryl Foggo, Margaret D. Jacobs, Elizabeth Jameson, Joan M. Jensen, Cynthia Loch-Drake, Sheila McManus, Laurie Mercier, Mary Murphy, Helen Raptis, Molly P. Rozum, Char Smith, Sylvia Van Kirk, Margaret Walsh

Elizabeth 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. She co-edited The Women's West with Susan Armitage and has published extensively on the histories of western women and the Canada-United States borderlands. Sheila McManus is Associate Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Her book, The Line Which Separates, was co-published by the University of Nebraska Press and The University of Alberta Press in 2005. Currently, she is writing a textbook on women in the U.S. West.