The Women's Great Lakes Reader [Paperback]

Victoria Brehm (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2001

Women lighthouse keepers, fur traders, cooks on sailing vessels, missionaries, and fearless travelers all wrote of their lives on the Great Lakes, both publicly and in quiet testimonies such as letters, logbooks, and diaries. Their narratives, which span the centuries from 1789 to the present, are now collected in this anthology. Compiled in response to historical accounts primarily from white men, this collection begins with American Indian myths and stories and continues through writings by women pioneers and travelers. More than three dozen selections of autobiography, fiction, newspaper accounts, and poetry chronicle the real danger and the physical and mental challenges of living in the environment of the Great Lakes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A great sourcebook for learning about women who shaped the Great Lakes Region" -- The Bloomsbury Review

"Offers both enlightenment and entertainment" -- Northlife

"This is such a great idea, why didn't somebody do it before?" -- Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal

About the Author

Victoria Brehm is a professor of American literature and the author of Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits: Stories of the Great Lakes. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She lives in Tustin, Michigan.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Ladyslipper Press, Inc.; 2 edition (April 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970260601
• ISBN-13: 978-0970260604
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,855,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I was fifteen-years old when I learned the lake did not love me or hate me but could claim me, nevertheless.", February 12, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Women's Great Lakes Reader (Paperback)

As opportunities for woman waxed and waned on the frontier of the Great Lakes of the 1800s, those few who performed jobs restricted to men were forced back into a patriarchal society that determined their roles more suited to hearth and home, "quelled by the anti-feminist rhetoric of the 1920s and the diminished opportunities of the 1930s". Harriet Colfax, a thirty-seven-year old lighthouse keeper of the Michigan City, Indiana, lighthouse in 1861 shined more than a figurative beacon on the wilderness landscape. In the late nineteenth century, gender roles were fluid in the Great Lakes region, allowing women to assume occupations formerly reserved for men. For a time, the frontier gave women access to well-paying positions as fur traders, cooks on lake's ships and travel writers. East Coaster's were avid readers of "local color", post-Civil War tales of wilderness travels by women who returned from their adventures to write of their exploits, delicious escapist reading for those concerned with urban sprawl, immigration and the inexorable advance of the Industrial Revolution.

Industrialization and the changes it wrought altered the landscape of women's opportunity, bringing with it restrictions of class and gender long familiar to "cultured" society, but in these tales, albeit briefly, women are the putative masters of their own fates. The Women's Great Lakes Reader honors those women who took the risk and journeyed into the unknown, achieving in this vast wilderness what they were denied in professions at home, an escape from the domesticity assigned to them, relying on their wits for survival in a genderless landscape. These narratives avoid the stereotypical stories of nation-building and development, the standards of a male perspective, written from the female point of view, "they tell us less about mastering a landscape and more about adjusting to it", perhaps the most important lesson in preparing for the future.

From "The First People on the Lakes", "Women Pioneers on the Frontier", "Women Travelers on the Lakes", "Women's Work" and "Women's Lives, Women's Lakes", these selections range from the Indian settlers of the early 1800s to a spiritual midlife journey in the 1990s. Here the voices rise from a distant past to join with the present in profiles, narratives, essays, stories and poetry that emerges from the common experience of a life-changing region, women in communication with nature, forging unique identities in a wilderness that refuses to be tamed. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A diversity of women's voices, August 6, 2005

By 

Joni Golden "I embrace, support and nurture p... (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Women's Great Lakes Reader (Paperback)

Lighthouse keepers, fur traders, cooks, wives and mothers - women from all walks of life have traveled to the Great Lakes region over the past 200 years.

Some stayed only a short time, others made interesting and often challenging lives. Their stories, collected by Grand Valley State University Professor Victoria Brehm in The Women's Great Lakes Reader, reveal a wide range of voices and experiences, from the poetry and travelogues to letters and diary entries about life in mining camps and homesteads around the shores of these vast bodies of water.

Among several dozen chapters are the polished words of novelist Constance Fenimore Wilson, who committed suicide at age 54, after becoming a popular and successful author. Weaving narrative into rich and vivid scenic detail, Wilson puts herself in the shoes of Roxana, who follows her husband into the west.

Brehm also includes brief but fascinating Chippewa tales penned in English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, daughter of a fur trader and a Native American woman who married explorer Henry Schoolcraft.

Written from 1789 to present day, each of the stories in this collection holds a unique place in women's history. Best of all, The Women's Great Lakes Reader reflects a diversity of women's voices and reinforces the timeless notion that no one voice speaks for us all.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Reader, November 29, 2004

By 

J. Wilson (Fort Wayne, IN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Women's Great Lakes Reader (Paperback)

I found this book to be extremely informative and entertaining. It enlightened me about the history and culture of the region, and looked at both aspects from a more feminist point of view. An excellent read for pleasure or education. I will definitely read it again.