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

Intoduction18403, Americans began heading west on the Oregon Trail to claim fertile agricultural land in Oregon.American expansionists advocated establishing the border at 54°4o' north latitude.Chanting "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," they elected James K. Polk president in 1844, and the new president quickly notified Britain that he would not extend the joint occupation of Oregon country.But despite his supporters' slogans, Polk could not fight a war on two fronts, and so, as he prepared for war with Mexico, he quietly began diplomatic negotiations with Britain.In June 1846, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon establishing the border west of the summit of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel, with a jog around the tip of Vancouver Island to place it under British sovereignty.The border between British North America and the United States remained porous, and was not in fact surveyed, marked, or mapped for many years.The North American Boundary Commission surveyed the border west of the Rockies beginning in 1858.The portion of the border from the Great Lakes to the Rockies was not mapped until 1872-1874.The lines that divide nations raise questions central to this volume.How do people's individual histories, or the histories of daily social life, connect with the histories of nation states?How do we link the histories of nations to the histories of cross-border migrations, to the people and economies and ecologies that traverse national borders?How do we respect the differences inscribed in national and social boundaries, yet challenge the inequalities of power and privilege they also erect?Crossing the boundaries of the national histories we know, like crossing social or class or racial boundaries, involves entering unfamiliar territory where all sorts of assumptions may be challenged, including unexamined assumptions about gender, history, and the nations to which we offer allegiance.Choosing to step across those lines means giving up the power of the familiar.The "Unsettled Pasts" conference, and the articles that appear here, build on a generation of scholarship that questioned the categories and assumptions that wrote women out of history.Those assumptions privileged elections and warfare over grassroots activism, public affairs over Intoduction xix mothers" of western women's history, Susan Armitage and Sylvia Van Kirk, imagine how the history of one transnational region, encompassing the states of Oregon and Washington and the province of British Columbia, might be written from the perspectives of gender and race.In Section Three, Jean Barman, Molly Rozum, and Joan Jensen address how the stories of individual western women are embedded in particular western places, and how their stories in turn might alter the stories of their Wests.In Section Four, Helen Raptis and Margaret Jacobs explore how women educators worked to push the boundaries of race, using one of the few accepted professions for women as an arena for social activism.In Section Five, Char Smith, Nora Faires, and Cheryl Foggo explore the very different experiences of three very different groups of women who immigrated across the 49th parallel: prostitutes, wealthy American women of Calgary's business elite, and African Canadians.xxiv Intoduction Next, in Section Six, Laurie Mercier and Cynthia Loch-Drake explore class through the experiences of women who were involved, as workers and as wives, with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, a union that played a significant role in both Canada and the United States.Finally, in Section Seven, professors Margaret Walsh and Mary Murphy discuss the challenges they have faced and the strategies they have employed in England and the United States to teach the comparative history of women in the Canadian and U. S. Wests.Each section is preceded by a brief introduction that suggests conceptual and comparative issues.One Step Over the Line is just that: a first step across the line that has divided the histories of women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests.These articles take a giant first step to begin exploring what links and separates our histories, as women of different races, sexualities, classes, and backgrounds; as Canadians and Americans.We are stepping into unfamiliar territory.We cannot build bridges across unmapped divides.

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