Wheat & Woman

Wheat and Woman is an important text in the history of western Canada. It remains the only published book-length account of a single woman farmer, a dynamic individual who challenged the conventions of her day, flouting definitions of appropriate possession and use of the land. She exemplified the potential choices that British women could make, but unlike the literary homesteaders of the United States, she did not romanticize the West as a place where single women could be freed from domesticity, drudgery, and poverty. Wheat and Woman revealed the extreme inequity of the homestead laws and the uneven distribution of power between men and women. Yet Binnie-Clark and others in the homesteads-for-women movement advocated the homestead rights of British and not all women. The book, and Binnie-Clark’s career, reminds us of how western Canada is a landscape profoundly shaped by ideas of gender, race, and empire. —From the introduction to the 2006 edition by Sarah Carter Used with permission.