Table des matières

Introduction
Ch. 1 Narrowing Opportunities For Women
Ch. 2 British Women Farmers for Canada
Ch. 3 Widows and Other Immigrant Women Homesteaders
Ch. 4 Purchasing Land
Ch. 5 Answering the Call of Empire
Ch. 6 The Homesteads for British-Born Women Campaign
Ch. 7 World War I and the 1920s
Conclusion

La description

Sarah Carter, FRSC, is professor and Henry Marshall Tory chair in the Department of History and Classics and the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta.

Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its “surplus” women. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the array of women who resolved to work on the land in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Récompenses

  • Winner, Gita Chaudhuri Prize, Western Association of Women Historians 2017
  • Winner, Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2017
  • Winner, CLIO History Prize (Prairies), Canadian Historical Association 2017
  • Short-listed, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize 2017
  • Short-listed, Wilson Book Prize 2017

Reviews

“Sarah Carter’s ambitious study of British women’s empire building on the Canadian plains takes a truly multi-national approach to questions of women’s place on the land, dealing as it does with policies and ideologies in Britain, Canada, the U. S., and elsewhere. It does an impressive job of examining the concept of ‘whiteness,’ and it appropriately fits the spirit of the Chaudhuri award, focusing as it does specifically on ‘WOMEN in rural environments. ’”

- Judging Committee, Gita Chaudhuri Prize

“A remarkable book that deserves all of the accolades that it has received, and one that continues the tradition of crafting a new western history in Canada. It will be required reading for anyone with an interest in Canadian and British Imperial history. ”

- Philip Van Huizen

Imperial Plots, with its double meaning, is a perfect title for Sarah Carter’s investigation of women’s efforts to acquire land of their own in western Canada from 1870 to 1930.”

- Marilyn Barber

Imperial Plots provides a valuable correction to the masculinist lens through which prairie history is so often viewed.”

- Penni Mitchell

“This book is more than a tribute to pioneer women and a lament for lost opportunities. The present keeps peering at us through the past. Then, as now, lines drawn on maps—be they borders or homestead boundaries—determine who will and won’t have access to the resources of this world. Too much of humanity’s always-limited intelligence is devoted to plotting out the reasons why some people deserve to be one side of the line and some on the other.”

- Doug Smith

“Carter shows how history can be well documented, provocative, and entertaining.”

- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Every chapter of Imperial Plots adds new and interesting details and their cumulative effect is enlightening. By considering the wider context so carefully and fully, Carter has made a major contribution to the scholarship on women and moved our thinking far beyond the heroism of individual homesteading women. Equally, she firmly drives a nail in the coffin of scholars who still insist that gender played no role in the formation and implementation of imperial policy. In sum, she has changed the terms of our historical questions.”

- Sue Armitage

Imperial Plots is a scathing indictment of the power of unchecked patriarchy. Whether found in the person of Frank Oliver, the dogmatic minister of the interior, in the repeal of dower rights, or in the widely held belief that women farmers were unnatural, the systematic constraint of women is the core of this story and a tale of imperial plotting.”

- Mary Murphy

“Carter’s study is a rich and insightful exploration of the individuals, the organizations, and the socio-cultural dynamics involved in women’s struggles to legally and literally do the spadework of British colonialism on the Canadian Prairies.”

- Lisa Chilton