Emily van der Meulen (editor) - From Suffragette to Homesteader: Exploring British and Canadian Colonial Histories and Women’s Politics through Memoir

FROM
SUFFRAGETTE
TO
HOMESTEADER

FROM
SUFFRAGETTE
TO
HOMESTEADER

Exploring British and Canadian Colonial Histories and Womens Politics through Memoir

Edited by
Emily van der Meulen

Fernwood Publishing
Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2018 Emily van der Meulen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing and text design: Brenda Conroy
Cover design: Housefires Design & Illustration
Printed and bound in Canada
eBook: tikaebooks.com

Published by Fernwood Publishing
32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0
and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3
www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

From suffragette to homesteader : exploring British and Canadian colonial histories and womens politics through memoir / Emily van der Meulen, editor.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77363-126-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77363-127-1 (EPUB).-
ISBN 978-1-77363-128-8 (Kindle)

1. Women--Saskatchewan--History--20th century. 2. Women--Great Britain--History--20th century. 3. Sentance, Ethel Marie. 4. Sentance, Ethel Marie--Diaries. 5. Suffragists--Great Britain--Biography. 6. Suffragists--Great Britain--Diaries. 7. Women colonists--Saskatchewan--Biography. 8. Women colonists--Saskatchewan--Diaries. 9. Frontier and pioneer life--Saskatchewan. I. Van der Meulen, Emily, 1977-, editor

HQ1459.S3F76 2018 305.4097124 C2018-903946-9
C2018-903977-9

Contents

Introduction: Just a Simple Story, Simply Told: A Memoir in Context
Emily van der Meulen

1 Engaging in Complex Relationships: On Reading and Understanding Womens Historical Life Narratives
Vicki S. Hallett

2 Memories (18831952)
Ethel Marie Sentance

3 Deeds, Not Words: The Struggle of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain
June Purvis

4 Locating Race in Suffrage: Discourses and Encounters with Race and Empire in the British Suffrage Movement
Sumita Mukherjee

5 From One Part of the Empire to Another: Promoting a Settler-Colonial Future in Late Nineteenth-Century Canadian Immigration Handbooks
Jarett Henderson

6 Unsettling Imperial Ties: Rethinking Suffrage in the Context of Settler Colonialism in Canada
Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell

7 Faithful, Brave-Hearted Pioneer Woman: Examining Womens Daily Lives on Saskatchewan Homesteads
Sandra Rollings-Magnusson

8 Sewing the Threads of Resilience: Twentieth-Century Indian Homemakers Clubs in Western Canada
Sarah A. Nickel

Post Script: Women and the Vote in Canada: A Brief Timeline
Emily van der Meulen

To Robert,
for everything.

Contributors

NANCY FORESTELL is a professor cross-appointed in the Department of History and the Womens and Gender Studies Program at St. Francis Xavier University. Her recent research has focused on various aspects of Canadian historical feminisms. Book publications include the co-edited collections Gender Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada (with Kathryn M. McPherson and Cecilia Louise Morgan) and Documenting First Wave Feminisms , 2 vols. (with Maureen Moynagh).

VICKI S. HALLETT is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University. Her research and writing focus on the co-constitutive aspects of identity and place as expressed through life narrative. She is currently working on a project that brings this focus to bear on the Labrador magazine Them Days . She is the author of Mistress of the Blue Castle: The Writing Life of Phebe Florence Miller , as well as numerous articles, the most recent of which can be found in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies , Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies , and TOPIA: A Journal of Canadian Cultural Studies .

JARETT HENDERSON is an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University. He is interested in the history of colonial rule in nineteenth-century British North America/Canada, in particular, the ways that the history of early Canada was bound up with larger, empire-wide debates. Jarett has published aspects of his scholarship in Histoire sociale/Social History, the Canadian Historical Review, and Archivaria , and is currently working on a project that explores the relationship between the history of sexuality and settler self-government in 1830s Upper Canada.

MARLENE KADAR is a professor of humanities in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies at York University. Her research focus is life writing theory and practice, especially in the face of narrative anguish and traumatic event. Kadars Essays on Life Writing was awarded the Gabrielle Roi Prize in 1992. Other book publications include Tracing the Autobiographical (with Susanna Egan, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley) and Working Memory (with Jeanne Perreault). Her work was honoured in 2017 by The International Auto/Biography Association at a symposium convened by Eva Karpinski (York University) and Ricia Anne Chansky (University of Puerto Rico).

MAUREEN MOYNAGH is a professor in the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University. She teaches postcolonial literature and theory, and her research interests include nationalism/transnationalism, narratives of anti-imperial travel, humanitarianism, and human rights discourse. Book publications include Nancy Cunard: Essays on Race and Empire , Political Tourism and Its Texts , and Documenting First Wave Feminisms, 2 vols . (with Nancy Forestell).

SUMITA MUKHERJEE is senior lecturer in history at the University of Bristol. She received her PhD in modern history from the University of Oxford and is an expert on Anglo-Indian relations and migration during the time of the British Empire. She is the author of Indian Suffragettes and Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England Returned and co-editor of South Asian Resistances in Britain 18571947 (with Rehana Ahmed).

SARAH A. NICKEL is a Tkemlupsemc (Kamloops Secwpemc) assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her areas of research include twentieth-century Indigenous politics and activism, Indigenous feminisms, community-engaged research, and oral history. She has published in American Indian Quarterly , BC Studies , Oral History Forum/dhistoire orale , and Active History . Her book Negotiating Unity: Indigenous Politics and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs is forthcoming, and she is co-editing a collection, Intergenerational Indigenous Feminisms (with Amanda Fehr and Erica Violet Lee).

JUNE PURVIS is an emeritus professor of womens and gender history, and head of the Womens and Gender Studies Research Cluster in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Portsmouth. She has published extensively on women history, womens education in nineteenth-century Britain, and the suffragette movement in Edwardian times. Her many book publications include the highly acclaimed Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography and Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography, as well as thirteen edited collections, most recently A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity (with Mary ODowd).