Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture

This book, written by Dr. Leigh Matthews, asks the question: “What do we really know about the lives of the women who homesteaded on the Canadian prairies in the late-19th/early 20th centuries?”

Matthews, a lecturer in English at Thompson Rivers University, noticed at a young age that television images such as Caroline Ingalls (of Little House on the Prairie fame) did not seem to represent what she knew of her own paternal grandmother, which inspired her to begin to question what kind of story real prairie women’s own voices might tell if given the chance to be heard.

The book, published by the University of Calgary Press, has its roots in the questions about womens’ experiences of homesteading that she began to ask as a child.

Written to benefit all audiences, the book works to rediscover a substantial body of forgotten memoirs authored by prairie women, examining them critically in order to increase our understanding of the homesteading era.

Catherine Cavanaugh of Athabasca University hails this groundbreaking study as “sound, well-developed and well-written” and both academic and lay readers alike seem to be interested in its message. The University of Calgary Press reports that the first printing of the book had nearly sold out before the ink was dry.

Leigh Matthews, author of Looking Back