This ambitious collection seeks to redress dominant histories of the US and Canadian Wests where considerations of gender and cross-border similarities and distinctions are concerned. The collection attempts to “take a first step” towards refiguring the masculine historical narratives of the West that have unfolded in exclusively national, rather than comparative, terms. Many essays engage with race as well as gender in a crucial recognition that the experiences of white women in the West have not spoken for all Western women. Other subjects tackled include sexuality and sex work, education (both as an object of history and through a discussion of cross-border pedagogy), class and union politics.

The collection is based on material from the 2002 Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History conference held at the University of Calgary, “the first major conference to emphasize comparative and transborder histories of women in the Canadian and US Wests.” Despite the conference's – and indeed, the collection's – groundbreaking mandate, however, there are times when One Step over the Line does not quite transcend its conference origins. The essays work best when they reflect the comparative framework of the collection itself, but this framework is not always maintained. For instance, Margaret D. Jacobs's attention to the removal of Native American children to boarding schools would have been enriched by some comparison with residential schools in Canada, either in the essay itself or if another essay on residential schools north of the border had been included. Curiously, although Jacobs invokes comparisons between the American schools and the Australian schools to which the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children were subject, Canada goes unmentioned. Similarly, Helen Raptis's engagement with the role of white women in the education of interned Japanese Canadian children during the Second World War cries out for a comparison with the education of Japanese American children during this time period. A further puzzling exclusion in the collection is the fact that, amongst the several important discussions of mixed-race society developed as a consequence of the fur trade, references to British Columbia Governor James Douglas omit the fact that he himself was of mixed-race descent.

Essays primarily focussed on retelling the lives of Western women would have benefited from further analysis of these lives and their implications, as the fascinating personal histories are often left to speak for themselves a little too much. An exception to this quibble is the inclusion of excerpts from Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain, which effectively and eloquently punctures the myth of Canada's racial tolerance through Foggo's experiences of growing up African Canadian in Alberta.

On the whole, however, these first steps across the lines of nation-state and gendered borders successfully argue for a dislodging of the primacy of male-centred approaches to the histories of both Canadian and American Wests. Perhaps most effectively, several essays foreground the methodological challenges of focussing on the histories of women in the North American Wests, exhibiting a self-reflexivity and a desire to proceed as ethically as possible in this emerging field of women's cross-border history.