The Slender Thread

Through Meticulous research, a skillful layering of evidence, and the interweaving of traditional and nontraditional sources, Willeen Keough moves women to the center of North American migration and early settlement narratives. She explores the lives of Irish Newfoundland women who cofounded fishing communities along the southern Avalon Peninsula in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work connects North American colonial history to a valuable historiography published in Canada and Ireland and opens up new areas of research into the gender roles and demographics of migration and settlement. In doing so, she makes a great contribution to colonial and women's history, as well as the history of the social division of labor, and writes a defining work that is extraordinary in its attention to the minutiae of women's everyday lives.