Imperial Plots

Narratives of the Canadian prairie west usually focus on male settlers transforming neatly surveyed land into farmsteads. With Imperial Plots Sarah Carter shifts the focus to women and their attempts to homestead. The book is both a social and political history. Carter asks who these women were, how their desire for landownership fit into settler communities and wider understandings of women’s agricultural capabilities, and how the government responded to female desire for land ownership. The majority of the book’s seven chapters focus on the settlement period prior to 1914. The chapters are thematic instead of chronological, which not only carefully distinguishes between various types of landownership but also makes the book functional for quick reference. Carter opens with Indigenous farming to make the point that farming as a solo male occupation was not always the norm. This discussion lays the groundwork for the book’s focus on how the colonial mentalité in Britain and Canada embraced the idea that white British women immigrants were to be protected within the domestic sphere. Consequently, the female pursuit of agriculture was therefore seen as making women less feminine thus working against the creation of a modern British society in the west.

Agriculture · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Government (linguistics) · Immigration · Indigenous · Narrative · Norm (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies