Montana Women Homesteaders : A Field of One's Own

"My Relatives in Iowa City, Iowa thought I was mentally deranged when I announced to them in 1908 I was going to take my little boy and move to Montana, " wrote homesteader Mattie T. Cramer in "Success of a Lone Woman Homesteader." "They could not understand how a 'lone woman' could expect to get along out in that wild country...."

Sarah Carter is a professor and H. M. Tory Chair at the University of Alberta's history and classics department and a member of the faculty of Native studies. A specialist in western Canadian history, she crossed the forty-ninth parallel to compare land policies in the western United States and western Canada. Her books include the importance of being monogamous: marriage and nation building in western canada, aboriginal people and colonizers of western canada, and capturing women: the manipulation of cultural imagery in canada's prairie west. The winner of the 2006 Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize for the best article published about women in the Trans-Mississippi West, Carter became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2007.