Introduction : the strange career of Madame Dubuque and midwestern women's history / Wendy Hamand Venet and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy -- Leadership within the women's community : Susie Bonga Wright of the Leech Lake Ojibwe / Rebecca Kugel -- Journeywoman milliner : Emily Austin, migration, and women's work in the nineteenth-century midwest / Lucy Eldersveld Murphy -- Mary McDowell and municipal housekeeping : women's political activism in Chicago, 1890-1920 / Karen M. Mason -- The limits of community : Martha Friesen of Hamilton County, Kansas / Pamela Riney-Kehrberg -- For the good of her people : continuity and change for native women of the Midwest, 1650-1850 / Tanis C. Thorne -- "Those with whom I feel most nearly connected" : kinship and gender in early Ohio / Tamara G. Miller -- The ethnic female public sphere : German-American women in turn of the century Chicago / Christiane Harzig -- Sisterhood and community : the Sisters of Charity and African American Women's Health Care in Indianapolis, 1876-1920 / Earline Rae Ferguson -- "The indescribable care devolving upon a housewife" : women's and men's perceptions of pioneer foodways on the Midwestern frontier, 1780-1860 / Sarah F. McMahon -- Changing times : Iowa farm women and home economics cooperative extension in the 1920s and 1950s / Dorothy Schwieder -- Women, unions, and debates over work during World War II in Indiana / Nancy F. Gabin -- "Making rate" Mexicana immigrant workers in an Illinois electronics plant / Irene Campos Carr.