Widely known and respected for her nature writing and poetry, Gilean Douglas (1900-1993) was also a journalist, naturalist, farmer, adventurist, and a feminist ahead of her time. Her writings span almost the entire twentieth century. This book both an intriguing biography and a collection of Douglas's best writing. From her childhood in the early 1900s through four marriages, ten years living in a small miner's cabin in a remote and inaccessible area the Cascade Mountains, and forty years on a homestead on Cortes Island. Like no other, Gilean Douglas's story illustrates the changing world for women in the twentieth century.

This book of personal essays by over forty women and men who founded women’s studies in Canada and Québec explores feminist activism on campus in the pivotal decade of 1966-76. The essays document the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society, and they challenge some current preconceptions about “second wave” feminist academics. The contributors explain how the intellectual and political revolution begun by small groups of academics—often young, untenured women—at universities across Canada contributed to social progress and profoundly affected the way we think, speak, behave, understand equality, and conceptualize the academy and an academic career. A contextualizing essay documents the social, economic, political, and educational climate of the time, and a concluding chapter highlights the essays’ recurring themes and assesses the intellectual and social transformation that their authors helped set in motion. The essays document the appalling sexism and racism some women encounter in seeking admission to doctoral studies, in hiring, in pay, and in establishing the legitimacy of feminist perspectives in the academy. They reveal sources of resistance, too, not only from colleagues and administrators but from family members and from within the self. In so doing they provide inspiring examples of sisterly support and lifelong friendship.

The Protected Place is a timeless and absorbing book. Within the framework of a calendar of the year, the author describes life at her isolated waterfront homestead on Cortes Island, British Columbia. Combining close observation of the natural world with reflection, research, vignettes of rural life and local history, this book is a celebration of place written by a woman deeply connected to the landscape by love and experience.

Francis and Amy Barrow spent the summers between 1933 and 1941 exploring the west coast in their little boat, searching for and recording First Nations rock art and yarning with the homesteaders in remote bays and inlets.

Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”