English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In 1913 a petition bearing over 11,000 signatures was presented to the Parliament of Canada asking that homestead rights in Western Canada be granted to ‘all women of British birth who have resided in Canada for one year’.1 This was the unsuccessful culmination of a campaign to allow unmarried women of British citizenry the ‘free’ homestead grant that was offered to male immigrants (regardless of marital status or citizenship) from Europe, the United States and other regions of Canada.2 The strategists behind this campaign (white, British-Canadian or Britishwomen) were specifically asking that the privilege not be granted to ‘foreign born’ women. They keenly felt it to be an injustice that ‘our own Canadian men — our fathers and our brothers — deliberately set us aside as undeserving of a share in our country’ while permitting ‘ignorant, uncouth, lawless foreigners to occupy lands that we desire, and that we have laboured for, yet cannot have’.3 They wished to offer ‘inducements to better class Canadians and Britishers to settle here’.4 The unsuccessful ‘homesteads-forBritish-women’ movement indicates that white women in Western Canada did not share in all of the privileges often associated with whiteness. They do not easily fit into what David Roediger has described as ‘the central overarching theme in scholarship on whiteness [which] is the argument that white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property’.5 Women of British ancestry in Canada had the expectation of privilege and advantages in acquiring property, and were frustrated that they had no such advantage, and exercised little power. Single women of all backgrounds were denied the right to homestead, and married women had no legal right to the homesteads they helped to acquire and maintain as dower rights were abolished in Western Canada in 1886.6 There was no white race privilege for the white women (and men) who were described and derided as ‘foreigners’. ‘Foreign’ women were denigrated and maligned in much the same ways as Aboriginal women.7 To elevate their own

Britishness, ‘Foreignness’, Women and Land in Western Canada 1890s–1920s