Women's Great Lakes Reader (Paperback, illustrated edition)

Women lighthouse keepers, fur traders, cooks on sailing vessels, missionaries, and fearless travelers all wrote of their lives on the Great Lakes. Their narratives, which span the centuries from 1789 to the present, are now collected in this anthology for the first time. Some writers, such as Frances Trollope and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, are well known. Others left their quiet testimonies in letters, log books, and diaries that have never before been published. Beginning with American Indian myths and stories, and continuing through writings by pioneer wives, travelers, and working women, more than three dozen selections of autobiography, fiction, newspaper accounts, and poetry chronicle what it has meant to live on the lakes from childhood to old age.

Remarkable stories emerge from these pages: Anna Jameson traveling by bateau from Mackinac Island to Sault Ste. Marie, where she will shoot the rapids in a canoe and be adopted by the Ojibwe; Emma Baylis describing her missionary work on Manitoulin Island every evening in her journal; Harriet Colfax entering her daily observations and dangers in the logbook of her lighthouse near Chicago; Ann Linnea chronicling her struggle to kayak around Lake Superior. Unlike many collections of women's frontier narratives, The Women's Great Lakes Reader demonstrates that even when confronting danger and discrimination, most women remained resilient and optimistic. As poet Judith Minty describes, they went "past the islands" into the open lake to confront their fears and master them.

Readers and students of United States and Canadian history will find much new material here to enrich their evolved from understanding of the region as it wilderness, to frontier, to industrialization. Introductions and biographical information accompany each entry to place each entry to place these women's writing in a personal and historical context.