She received her Master’s degree from San Francisco State University and her Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation study, published by New York University Press in 2004, is entitled How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. In addition to her continuing research on women’s political and labor history, she is currently engaged in studies of both the Swedish immigrants in Michigan, and of the metis (mixed Native-White) people of the Southern Great Lakes area.