Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies is a 2016 book by Sarah Carter, professor of history at the University of Alberta.

[1] In order to qualify for a Canadian homestead during this period, a woman would have to be classified as the sole head of a household, which effectively meant a widow with dependent children.

Carter argues that women were integral to the success of any homestead they participated in, performing essential labour and household management, while at the same time being denied the same legal rights as men.

However, Canadian officials clearly envisioned the role for such women as being wives, mothers, and domestic workers rather than farmers themselves, yet still an integral ingredient to the dispossession of land from Indigenous peoples.

[4][6] Such officials feared that female farmers denigrated their femininity and in turn their model British society;[7] this was also part of an effort to distinguish western Canada from what was seen as the more "chaotic" United States.