Synopsis

Sarah Carter provides a detailed description of marriage as a diverse social institution in nineteenth-century Western Canada, and the subsequent ascendancy of Christian, lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous marriage as an instrument to implement dominant British-Canadian values. It took work to impose the monogamous model of marriage as the region was home to a varied population of Aboriginal people and newcomers such as the Mormons, each of whom had their own definitions of marriage, including polygamy and flexible attitudes toward divorce. The work concludes with an explanation of the negative social consequences for women, particularly Aboriginal women, that arose as a result of the imposition of monogamous marriage.

Biography

Sarah Carter, F.R.S.C., is H.M. Tory Chair and Professor in the Department of History and Classics, and Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is a specialist in the history of Western Canada and is the author of Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's Prairie West, and Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Sarah Carter was awarded the Jensen-Miller Prize by the Coalition for Women’s History for the best article published in 2006 in the field of women and gender in the trans-Mississippi West. Sarah Carter was a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in2011 in the Scholarly Nonfiction category for her book Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One's Own.