Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 301

This book stems from the author’s sense of a discrepancy between her own family’s lived experience of the Canadian ranching frontier and how its history is portrayed in books and popular culture. Throughout the book, the myth of a landscape dominated by male cowboys is proven to be highly misleading and only kept alive in historical works through a selective use of sources. In this way, the author positions herself within the revisionist historiographical camp that aims to correct gender-biased narratives and more accurately recognize women’s role in history.

This study of the southern Alberta ranch-lands covers the period between the first introduction of cattle herds in the 1880s to about 1930. Drawing from published and unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters, the focus is placed on the ‘lived experience’ of the pioneer generations of women on the Alberta frontier. Other sources include photographs, interviews with descendants and material artefacts (just consider the significance of saddles!)

Family farms developed into the most successful ranch model in this period and increasingly replaced the initially widespread, but often failing, large-scale open-range ranches. The family ranches’ pre-eminence has previously been explained in terms of their ability to easily adapt to the environment and in their combination of mixed farming with extensive livestock grazing. In addition, the author argues that a crucial aspect in the making of family ranches’ success was the efficient integration of women into the production and management of the ranch. Reflections on the economic aspects of ranching do not constitute the core of the analysis, however: instead the focus remains on the women themselves and their lived experiences.

The three first chapters respectively discuss the role of women in the emerging cattle ranching industry, the place of the family ranch within this context, and the gendered division of labour on the ranch. Throughout these chapters, the argument that women played a significantly more active and varied role in ranching than has previously been acknowledged is much repeated. Moreover, the author does not content herself with simply refuting the masculine cowboy myth, but she further argues that the encounter with the ‘frontier existence’ reformed gender roles and created opportunities for female emancipation. This is possibly the book’s strongest contribution. The analysis of how Victorian women turned themselves into labouring cowgirls on the frontier is a revealing example of how gender roles can be negotiated, dismantled and reconstructed by the historical conditions in an agrarian milieu.

In the initial settling phase, the author argues, the labour of all family members was required to be able to establish the ranch. In addition, husbands often had to be absent for temporary wage employments and many wives got used to running their ranches independently. Furthermore, family ranches often relied on supplementary sources of income such as eggs and dairy products and women were often responsible for this production. Ideally, in the author’s view, the ranch was based on a companionate marriage where both labour and love were shared. In such a constellation, the division of labour was a matter of pragmatics and it was not uncommon for husbands to do the dishes, wash clothes, or perform other domestic tasks in order to set their wives free to do urgent outdoor ranch work.

Expanding the analysis of the women’s productivity, the fourth chapter explores their reproductive labour. Human reproduction was, of course, essential in securing the ranches’ future on the isolated frontier. However, childbirth was also in all likelihood the greatest and most fatal risk women were exposed to, isolated as they were from both reproductive knowledge and skilled care. In this context, material inequality seems to this reviewer to have been a more crucial issue than Herbert acknowledges in her claims that ‘class was a factor that mattered little in the daily realities of sustaining a home and family on the frontier’ (p. 49) and that ‘women were equalized by their birthing experiences’ (p. 87). On the contrary, several examples in the book suggest that there was a considerable difference between those who were forced to work until shortly before giving birth and immediately afterwards and those who could instead afford rest and hired caretakers. This inequality is neglected in the author’s general conclusions.

In the fifth chapter, the female condition is examined in relation to material artefacts such as saddles and clothing. This chapter explores how women navigated between fashion and function and often successfully managed to be both Victorian ladies and riding ranch labourers. The final chapter emphasizes the importance of women’s relationships to horses for their frontier emancipation. On the back of a horse, a woman rancher was just as able to work as her male equivalent. The horses also allowed women to break free from their isolated location and to find recreation, pleasure and interspecies affection and love. These two chapters effectively expand the general argument that women’s gender roles were transformed through their frontier existence.

An appendix comprising the unpublished memoir, ‘My sunset childhood’, by the ranching woman, Constance Ings Loree, is included. Although the memoir would have benefited from being accompanied by an introduction or comment by the author, it synthesizes most themes covered throughout the book’s six chapters and enriches the author’s ambition to bring women’s lived experiences to the forefront. The generous number of photographs from archives and private collections reproduced in the book similarly animates the story and strengthens the argument.

Rachel Herbert hopes that her publication will become a catalyst for further study and the reviewer can only agree that this would be much appreciated. This is not least the case with regard to the role of indigenous women who – even though they were the area’s first female ranchers – are excluded from Herbert’s study. Nevertheless, Ranching women provides a strong, personal and thoughtful account of the historical importance of ‘cowgirls’ and of how gender was reconstructed in people’s mundane encounters with the ranching frontier’s environment, everyday challenges, material artefacts and horses.