In 1952, Ethel Marie Sentance wrote a memoir for her husband, Clarence. She gave it to him as a present for their fortieth wedding anniversary on August 19th of that year. The memoir begins in 1883 and details Ethel’s compelling story. Living in a small English village, Ethel became a suffragette in her early twenties after being frustrated with women’s inequality and lack of enfranchisement. She participated in meetings and rallies, sold suffrage newspapers and was eventually jailed for breaking a window at a protest. In 1912, she married and relocated to the Saskatchewan prairies to become a homesteader and settler. Ethel’s first-person account of her bisected life opens an extraordinary window into women’s history, activism and experiences in early twentieth-century England and Canada.

Surrounding Ethel’s memoir are chapters written by leading scholars of women’s history that provide further analysis and context, exploring topics within and beyond those written about by Ethel. In this way, From Suffragette to Homesteader is a unique story of social justice advocacy, women’s and feminist histories, struggles for gender equality, and the farmworker and homesteader experience, while also being a story of the British Empire, race and class, colonialism and imperialism, and Indigenous/settler relations.