This course will provide students with an overview of how the history of women have profoundly shaped and given meaning to the development of the North American West (which includes present-day states and provinces in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico). The class will examine the lives of women who represent diverse backgrounds, lands, and time periods in this western region. In addition to women, lectures, readings, and discussion will focus on the themes of gender, masculinity, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, labor, and environment. Broad in chronological scope that spans pre-contact into the twenty-first century, this course is not a comprehensive survey. Rather, the class will examine how women and groups of women across the region defended, survived, explored, cultivated, and imagined the West as a place that defined their homes, migrations, settlement patterns, as well as sites of captivity, displacement, war, and development. (Same as WGSS 305.)