Biography & Autobiography Women
Wheat and Woman
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
- Initial publish date
- Dec 2006
- Category
- Women, Social History, Post-Confederation (1867-), Historical
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780802038135
- Publish Date
- Dec 2006
- List Price
- $37.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442655218
- Publish Date
- Dec 2006
- List Price
- $37.95
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Description
An established writer before she came to Canada, Georgina Binnie-Clark (1871-1947) settled in Saskatchewan in 1905 to become a farmer. It was an unlikely ambition for a woman in her day, particularly an English gentlewoman, and in the opinion of many, an impossible one. The reaction of onlookers was unhesitatingly and unqualifiedly unsupportive. Binnie-Clark, however, proved their skepticism to be unfounded.
Originally published in 1914, Wheat and Woman is an autobiographical account of Georgina Binnie-Clark's first three years on the prairies, the story of how she learned to define and deal with her anomalous position in pre-war prairie society. Although Binnie-Clark does not dismiss the difficult lessons of life on the land for an 'English greenhorn,' or the loneliness of a woman pursuing what was considered to be a man's job, she emphasizes the unique opportunities for women in Canada. If life was difficult in Canada, it was impossible, for some, in England. With a surplus population of more than a million women, most stood almost no statistical chance of finding a husband in England. The gentlewomen among them were barred by class from all but a few overcrowded and underpaid occupations.
Wheat and Woman also illuminates the sexual politics of settlement. Binnie-Clark was only too familiar with the limitations that Canadian law placed on women. Among women of the prairies, chief among these was the homestead law, which excluded all but a handful of women from the right to claim a free farm from the Dominion's public lands. This new reprint of Binnie-Clark's autobiographical writing includes an introduction by Susan Jackel, written for a 1979 edition of the text, as well as a new scholarly introduction by historian Sarah A. Carter, who received a Killam Fellowship for the study of Great Plains women of Canada and the United States.
Wheat and Woman is a fascinating record of a gifted and determined woman's experience in prairie farming and a unique document in Canadian social history.
About the authors
Georgina Binnie-Clark (1871-1947) was an established writer who settled in the Prairies to become a farmer.
Georgina Binnie-Clark's profile page
Sarah Carter, F.R.S.C., is H.M. Tory Chair and Professor in the Department of History and Classics, and Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is a specialist in the history of Western Canada and is the author of Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Capturing Women, and Lost Harvests. Sarah Carter was awarded the Jensen-Miller Prize by the Coalition for Women's History for the best article published in 2006 in the field of women and gender in the trans-Mississippi West.
Other titles by
Ancestors
Indigenous Peoples of Western Canada in Historic Photographs
Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice
Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces
Compelled to Act
Histories of Women's Activism in Western Canada
Lost Harvests
Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy, Second Edition
Mistress of Everything
Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds
Imperial Plots
Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies
Recollecting
Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands
The The West and Beyond
New Perspectives on an Imagined Region
The West and Beyond
New Perspectives on an Imagined Region
The Importance of Being Monogamous
Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915