Wheat and Woman (review)

In 1905, Georgina Binnie-Clark, a British journalist in her early thirties with no knowledge of agriculture, bought a 320-acre farm in Saskatchewan. With some financial assistance from her father and loans from the bank, she embarked on an experiment to demonstrate that single women could successfully farm on their own, thus offering an alternative to marriage and dependence for supernumerary British women of the middle class. First published in 1914, Wheat and Woman is an account of the first three years of her Canadian adventure based on her personal journal. Here she recorded the details of her precarious financial situation, mistakes due to her inexperience, the capriciousness of the prairie climate, the chronic shortage of labour, and the importance of mutual assistance among neighbours. Male farmers shared these difficulties as well, but as a woman, she faced additional obstacles: the paternalistic attitudes of male neighbours, hired help, bankers, agents, and government representatives, all of whom believed that this was no occupation for a single woman.

Indeed, what Binnie-Clark experienced on the prairies was not frontier equality but the sexual politics of settlement and citizenship. Homesteading laws denied single women the right to claim a free land grant from the Canadian government. So, unlike her neighbours, she purchased her farm for $5,000, which meant it would take years before it became profitable. Using her journalistic skills, she campaigned vigorously for full homesteading rights for women, but found little sympathy from men. On a number of occasions, she expressed her frustration with what she believed to be the laziness of men, including her own brother who was also trying his hand at farming, and their lack of appreciation for women’s work. Her dependence on hired men who, she claimed, did as little as possible for their money, combined with her meagre financial resources, finally convinced her to learn how to milk in addition to cleaning the stables, cutting wood, and hauling water. She took on these chores in order to save money for expert help in crucial times like seeding and harvesting. She also learned how to make bread and cooked three meals a day for hired men, although she ‘env[ied] Canadians the power of getting through their household duties as easily as one puts on one’s clothes.’

In her introduction to this third edition, historian Sarah Carter situates Binnie-Clark’s story in the context of women’s history as an evolving discipline, but also within a renewed interest in the history of British imperialism, to examine further the role of women in this enterprise. Devoted to her country and the development of its ‘daughter nation,’ Binnie-Clark was perhaps an imperialist more than a feminist. She advocated for homesteading rights for British women, not all women, and did so by pointing to the injustice of ‘foreigners’ benefiting from the largesse of the Canadian government. Wheat and Woman also has much to add to the history of gender in Western Canada, thus giving a new purpose to a book that was essentially forgotten after the second edition was published in 1979.

Part autobiography, advice manual, and social commentary with a dash of fiction, this book does not fit neatly into one category. However, this latest edition introduces a new generation of readers to a prairie farmer who happened to be a woman, but also to a time when British emigrants of gentle birth were settling Western Canada, and Aboriginals were being pushed to the margins of a nation in the making. In many ways, Binnie-Clark had much in common with her British male contemporaries who were looking for some relief in the ‘colonies’ from limited options in the mother country. Like most of them, including her brother, she was well educated but had much to learn about farming in the Canadian West. By being a single woman operating a farm on her own and having no intention of becoming a farmer’s wife, she, along with her brother, were, in the words...