In The Backwoods of Canada and The Canadian Settler's Guide, Catherine Parr Traill described a pioneer woman's role on the Ontario frontier, presenting an idealized portrait of the Canadian woman pioneer in the mid-nineteenth century. By transposing this figure into fiction, Traill managed to create what was, in effect, a new fictional character type: the pioneer woman.

Living the high life in LA – cocktail parties, exotic restaurants and a cosmopolitan boyfriend – Ree Drummond thinks she’s got it all figured out. But, try as she might, she can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. Returning to her hometown to get her life in order, Ree is struck by a bolt of lightning - a blue-eyed, strong-jawed, enigmatic cowboy. She calls him Marlboro Man, and though he’s a million miles away from anything she’s ever known before, their attraction is undeniable. But with her family coming apart at the seams, her ex-boyfriend still on the scene, and a new career waiting for her in the city, their courtship is far from simple. As life on the ranch beckons (complete with cows, horses, prairie fires and lots of manure), is she really ready to trade in her high heels for Wranglers? Heartwarming, funny and passionate, Pioneer Woman is a story of romance against the odds, and of how love can find you in the most unexpected places.

Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts, published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings -- from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors -- Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.

A friend once said to her, ‘If I wished to increase your height two and a half inches, I would attempt to press you down, and you would grow upward from sheer resentment.’ Divorced at eighteen from an abusive husband in 1859 (scandalous at the time), and with a little baby to care for, Bethenia Angelina Owens was determined to make her way in the world. Her family begged her to let them support her but she wanted to earn her own livelihood. Taking in laundry, teaching school, and making cheese were among the tasks she set herself to. She eventually built a thriving business as a milliner that allowed her to send her son to college and to fulfill her own dream of becoming a doctor. Against all odds and a tidal wave of objections by friends, family, and male doctors, she prevailed. Despite the sentiment of the times that it was disgraceful for a woman to practice medicine, she enrolled in 1878 at the University of Michigan. By 1884, she was making $7,000 per year, an astronomical sum, as a physician. For all of her life she was a strong and vocal advocate of women's rights. As a doctor, she gave the shocking advice, "Nothing will preserve woman’s grace and her symmetrical form so much as vigorous and systematic exercise, and horseback riding stands at the head of the list, providing she has a foot in each stirrup, instead of having the right limb twisted around a horn." She also provides accounts of other pioneer women of her acquaintance. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above. Buy it today!

Describes the lives of women of various backgrounds as they traveled west, established homes, worked inside and outside the home, and helped to develop settled society

A book about the life of pioneer women in Kansas.

This study investigates the connections between nineteenth-century pioneer women in Canada and their putative twentieth-century biographers in Anglo-Canadian women's fiction by Carol Shields (Small Ceremonies, 1976), Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic, 1988), and Susan Swan (The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 1983). These three texts reveal definite problems in the formation of Canadian female identities, but they also revalorise the traditionally underprivileged halves of binary structures such as: female/male, other/self, body/intellect, subjectivity/objectivity, and Canada/imperial centres.

For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.

Producing Women examines the ways femininity is produced through new media. Michele White considers how women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures on sites like Etsy, and deploy technological processes to reshape their identities and digital characteristics. She studies the means through which women market traditional female roles, are viewed, and produce and restructure their gendered, raced, eroticized, and sexual identities. Incorporating a range of examples across numerous forms of media—including trash the dress wedding photography, Internet how-to instructions about zombie walk brides, nail polish blogging, DIY crafting, and reborn doll production—Producing Women elucidates women’s production cultures online, and the ways that individuals can critically study and engage with these practices.