In Their Own Words
Mothers and Daughters on the Alberta Frontier, 1890-1929
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11240874 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eliane Leslau Silverman (corresponding author), Eliane Silverman |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 37 |
| Publication date | 1977-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0160-9009 • E-ISSN: 1536-0334 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3346009 |
| OpenAlex | W2334109101 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
The last land rush in North America took place in Alberta, Canada, where the movement of populations westward which had begun in Virginia in 1607 took its final form in the twentieth century. Opportunities, both economic and psychic, were available in the harsh demanding country of prairie, mountains, and brush. Women began arriving at urban and rural areas by 1890. They came from the United States and from eastern Canada. They came from Germany, and the Ukraine, and Italy. As children, they left their homes with their parents; as adults they migrated as single women, as married women going to join their husbands, or as wives accompanying their husbands. Economic opportunity, mobility for their children, the decisions of their husbands, resistance against the confines of traditional societies, or the lure of the West drew them to Alberta--touted as a land of openness. Certainly, it was a land of diversity, from wheat and cattle country in the prairies, to coal mining in the foothills, to forestry in the Rocky Mountains, to impenetrable brush and muskeg in the north. Despite its rigors, Alberta beckoned; its population grew from 78,000 in 1900 to 750,000 in 1929. Some of the women arrived to face the new land with nothing but a suitcase and a feather quilt; sometimes they arrived laden with a piano, books, silver, lace tablecloths. Many of them also brought an array of cultural baggage, while others self-consciously left behind the world from which they came. Language, customs, patterns of relationships, and perceptions of hierarchy might be treasured or abandoned, cherished or reviled. They came from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds. Few of them knew what they might find in the new society. What they found depended often on chance and accident--more often, indeed, than the western myth led them or us to believe. The accident of place: whether the homestead chosen by a finger pointed to a spot on a map lay on the dry side of the hill; whether the neighbors in the town mocked a foreign accent; whether the lumber camp could take on men in the winter; whether there was a school nearby; or whether the children must board with a town family. The accident of time: the price of grain commanded that year at the market; a boom in construction in the fall; the local school board's ability, ever vacillating, to pay its female teacher. How they reacted was influenced by the cultures and the psychologies the women brought with them, communally or individually. A Ukrainian, coming with less than nothing and sometimes accruing no more, still might feel at home surrounded by people from the old country, while an English-speaking woman from a middle-class Ontario family might feel bereft and isolated among farmers, never to feel one of them and always to yearn for the past. Finally, a woman's response to the new life might have arisen from a self-conscious attempt to cope (you just had to keep going) or, conversely, from an almost conscious awareness that she could not and would not adapt
Archaeology · Frontier · Genealogy · American Literature and Culture · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1978 - 2018 (41) |
| Highly cited | No |