A substantial and carefully researched study by sociologist Sandra Rollings-Magnusson of MacEwan University, whose three decades of scholarship on Western Canadian settlement have produced a respected body of articles, monographs, and lectures on the homesteading experience. In this volume she turns her attention to the often-overlooked women who carved out independent lives on the prairies — widows striving to maintain family holdings, deserted or divorced women making a new beginning, and single women determined to secure land and livelihood on their own terms.
Drawing deeply on archival repositories, government homestead files, personal correspondence, regional newspapers, and other primary sources, Rollings-Magnusson reconstructs the daily realities, legal obstacles, social expectations, and extraordinary resilience of these female settlers. The result is a richly documented and thoughtfully argued examination of women’s agency in the settlement of the West.
