"[2] When the Boer War and a tsetse fly plague[3] created financial hardship that the family could not overcome, they emigrated, moving first to England, where they stayed for a time with Charles Higham,[4] the brother-in-law who had first employed Harry in South Africa.
[7] In 1923, she and her sister Dora May Sanders shared an apartment on College Street in Toronto; they both held jobs at the T. Eaton company, where they earned $25 a week.
[1][8] Sanders kept her job after her marriage on the condition that she “not have children” and that she retain her maiden name as her byline, “keeping the wedding highly secret.”[4] This caused somewhat of an issue when her two children (Dora [“Dodie”] Frances Sperry and David Byrne Sperry) arrived in 1932 and 1934, but with the assistance of her sister Dora, who took over her editorial duties for a number of months during her second pregnancy, Sanders retained her position as editor of Chatelaine.
In 1942, the National Post called her “Miss Sanders,” but noted that “in private life she is Mrs. Frank Sperry.”[3] In 1942, Byrne took a volunteer position with the Wartime Prices and Trade Board in Ottawa, as director of the Consumers' Representation Branch, where “more than 15,000 women worked as volunteers with Sanders” as “she urged women to lead the fight against inflation.”[6] For her role in the wartime efforts, she was awarded a CBE in July 1946.
[9] In January 1952, she and her brother Wilfrid, a director for the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (which provided data for the Gallup Poll) founded Sanders Marketing Research.