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In 1905, Georgina Binnie-Clark, a single Englishwoman, visited her brother in Saskatchewan and fell in love with the Canadian West. Her dream was to farm, but government laws barred single women from owning homesteading property, while the regulations practically gave away land to men. Undeterred, Miss Binnie-Clark -- described by her contemporaries as a woman of "unusual enterprise and rare pluck" -- became the driving force behind the "homesteads for women" movement and helped lay the foundations for feminists in Western Canada. "She wished to farm, but was not accorded this privilege because of her sex," said Sarah Carter, a history professor at the University of Calgary who has won a Killam Fellowship, one of Canada's most esteemed research awards, to study great Plains women. Ms. Carter said female homesteaders never received much attention in Canadian history, as people just assumed there were no woman-operated farms.
Miss Binnie-Clark was in her mid- thirties when she arrived in Saskatchewan to visit her brother, who was running an unsuccessful homestead. Within her first few months in the province, she grew to love the landscape and documented her experience in a book, A Summer On The Canadian Prairie. But the Canadian Dominion Lands Act of 1872 placed stringent conditions on how women could acquire land. The only way a woman could obtain homestead land was if she was a widow with minor children. "Their ability to qualify was very carefully scrutinized by the bureaucrats and the department of the interior," Ms. Carter said. Miss Binnie-Clark paid $5,000 to buy her own farm, a huge sum when compared with the $10 that men were paying the government for a 160-acre plot of land. A
1909 article in the Grain Grower's Guide reported Miss Binnie-Clark
spent the bitter winter of 1906/07 alone at her newly acquired
farm, tending to her animals and collecting wood. Later, she
hired men to help her, but aside from her regular chores, which
included cooking enormous meals for her hired help,
Thanks to the efforts of Miss Binnie-Clark and other women, the matter was raised in the House of Commons in 1910 but without success. Many believed if single women were allowed to homestead, more families with daughters would settle in the Canadian West. Men supported Miss Binnie-Clark's cause as well. A 1913 petition was signed by 11,000 male electors, but was also ignored, Ms. Carter said. Miss Binnie-Clark wrote another book about her farming experience, Wheat and Woman, described by Ms. Carter as a how-to guide for aspiring female farmers that documented the disadvantages women faced in the Canadian West. Just before the Second World War began, Miss Binnie-Clark moved back to England, where she died in 1947. Her sister continued to run the farm until she died in 1955. "There's
certain aspects of the history of the acquisition of land that
have, to me, been really overlooked -- one of them being the
strict limitations placed on Canadian women as opposed to their
female cousins "In the U.S., single women could acquire homesteads and did acquire homesteads in the thousands. They were not permitted that privilege in Western Canada. The abolishment of dower rights as well as the homesteads for women were definitely two fuels of the feminist movement in Western Canada." As part of her research, Ms. Carter intends to compare how female homesteaders were treated in Saskatchewan and Montana. "Very similar areas, settled at roughly the same time, roughly the same sort of terrain, but you will find these remarkable differences," she said. One community in Montana was named Ladyville because six single women had all filed claims for homesteads in the same area, said Ken Robison, a historian at the Joel F. Overholser Historical Research Center in Fort Benton, Mont. The unfair restrictions also pushed some women south of the border, Ms. Carter said. In 1910, Etta Smalley, a single schoolteacher from Edmonton, decided to leave Canada in the summer and travel to Montana, where she claimed her own homestead. "They'd work in Canada and return to the U.S. to homestead," Ms. Carter said. Ms. Smalley continued to teach in Alberta and also taught in Montana while she "proved up" and eventually married. When a person acquired a homestead, in Canada or the United States, they had three years to "prove up," which meant they had to put up some kind of dwelling, usually a rudimentary shack, and plant crops. Ida Robert, another schoolteacher from rural Saskatchewan, followed suit four years later. The stipulation in the Dominion Lands Acts that allowed widows to become homesteaders helped an unconventional woman, by the standards of the Victorian age, become one of the few women to own a homestead in Western Canada. Elisa
Vane was a widow and the mistress of a married English wine
merchant named Percy Criddle. Mr. Criddle had children with
both his wife and Ms. Vane and when the Criddles emigrated to
southern Manitoba, the Vanes followed suit. Ms. Vane established
her homestead right next to the Criddle Kathryn McPherson, a history professor at York University, said this caused problems later. When a Criddle became enamoured with a Vane, the parents had to tell the young sweethearts they were in fact brother and sister. Ms. McPherson said the task of building a dwelling, cultivating land and yielding crops often proved to be a daunting task for a single mother with small children. Many widows would wait until their sons became teenagers -- but before they turned 18 and were no longer considered minors -- to file their homestead claims. "The widow didn't want to go and homestead too soon because if her kids were young, she had no labour to do the farm work," Ms. McPherson said. Waiting for her sons to reach their mid-teens before making her homestead claim was a smart economic move for a widow. By the time she "proved up" her homestead, her sons would be old enough to make a claim for the available land on an adjacent homestead lot and the family could amass up to 320 acres in three to five years, Ms. McPherson said. Remarrying was another good economic move. A widow could file her own homesteading claim in addition to the land her new husband was entitled to. "It's interesting the loopholes they found," she said. "They actually remarried and then they went and homesteaded because they were technically widowed." Mr. Robison said many of the single female homesteaders in the United States would claim their land and marry soon after, usually a neighbour nearby so they could merge their two properties. Marrying was advantageous for a female homesteader, as it would provide much-needed help. "In most cases, they would wind up marrying and merging and they would then become more focused on family raising," he said. Isabel Beaton Graham, one of Ms. Binnie-Clark's contemporaries and the women's editor at the Grain Grower's Guide, often lamented the situation of the Western Canadian woman. "Women
should have the right to homestead if they desire to do so,"
Ms. Beaton-Graham wrote in 1909. "Have they not helped
to develop this Western country and should they not have equal
privileges with their sisters south Western Canadian women finally won the right to homestead in the 1930s. "And
by that time, there was virtually no homestead land left,"
Ms. Carter said.
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How
women won the West:
The government barred single women from owning homesteads,
while land was practically given away to men. Undeterred, Georgina
Binnie-Clark initiated the "homesteads for women"
movement and helped lay the foundations for feminists in Western
Canada.
While
the fight for the women's vote in Western Canada may have garnered
the most attention, another feminist battle was sweeping the
Canadian West as single women fought for the right to become
independent farmers and to own homesteads.
But
because of the government bias, Miss Binnie-Clark initiated
the "homesteads for women" movement, which reached
its height between 1908 and 1911, Ms. Carter said.