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Wheat & Woman by Georgina Binnie-Clark Social History of Canada Soft Cover
Wheat & Woman by Georgina Binnie-Clark
Social History of Canada 30
Soft cover
Copyright University of Toronto Press 1979
313 pages
Contents
PART I: HARVEST HOME
1 Of agricultural equipment, horses, and hired men 7
2 The custom of deferred payment - a prairie storm 16
3 A vagabond garden 22
4 Of harvest, wages, the cost of implements and plant 30
5 Threshing 41
6 Wheat sales - the fall of the leaf - Le Bret 49
7 Friends and acquaintances in Fort Qu'Appelle 62
8 Winter quarters - Springbrook school - a political meeting 72
9 At home by the lake shore - of Canadian diversion 81
10 Nancy - the second payment - the first loss 90
PART II: SPRING
1 A daughter of the prairie - the coming of Nancy 101
2 The mirage of spring - my first chore-boy - a new horse and a new man - seeding 107
3 Chore-boys - 'the beautiful necessity' - the story of a plough 120
4 Dairy-produce - fencing - milking - gardening -Victoria Day 128
5 An Irishman's fortune - stoning the land 141
6 The rains of June - haying - harvest 150
7 The harvest of my first seeding 167
PART III: WINTER
1 Of fuel and fear - the end of the year 181
2 Preparing seed-grain - newcomers 194
3 The seeding month - the coming of Felicity 206
4 The land and the man 214
5 Shadow and scythe beneath the sword 228
6 Summer diversion - law and labour - Patrick O'Hara and Si Booth 239
7 The frozen harvest of 1907 251
8 The day of reckoning - auf wiedersehen 265
PART IV: THE TURN OF THE TIDE
1 The seed - the passing of a prairie fire 275
2 The blade - the ear - the full corn 287
3 Sales, mortgage - 'a larger heaven' 301
An established writer before she came to Canada, Georgina Binnie-Clark 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 was an unhesitating and unqualified 'she can't.' She could, however, and she did. Wheat and Woman is an autobiographical
account of Georgina Binnie-Clark's first three years on the prairies, the story of how one woman farmer learned to define and deal with her anomalous position in pre-war prairie society.
Although the book 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, it emphasizes the unique opportunities for women in Canada. If life was difficult in Canada, it was impossible, for some, in England. In 1901 a surplus population of more than a million women stood 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 disabilities that Canadian law placed on the woman farmer. 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. Susan Jackel's introduction traces the history of the homesteads-for-women movement which was carried on by journalists and farmers, without success, right up to 1930 and which found its most extended and articulate rationale in Wheat and Woman.
Wheat and Woman is a fascinating record of a gifted and determined woman's 'experiment' in prairie farming and a unique document in Canadian social history.
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