Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman's Journey into the Great War.

Norma Hall is a historian who specializes in colonial era settlements in
Newfoundland and Manitoba at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Alberta author and editor Debbie Marshall supplies a sympathetic biography that takes Roberta MacAdams out of history’s background. Marshall reintroduces this once famous, now largely forgotten participant in the Great War and the Canadian political arena in an interpretation that describes the war’s affect on the “ordinary people” of early 20th-century Canada. Marshall seeks to discover what compelled MacAdams, an admittedly sheltered, privileged, and conventional middle class woman, to engage in unpredictable and dangerous pursuits. Examining the means by which MacAdams came to accomplish the extraordinary presents the author with a dilemma: how does one reconstruct a history when the subject was modest to the point of self-censorship?

MacAdams left few paper traces. At least three distinct narrative strands, therefore, are visible as the text unfolds: the writer’s search for her subject; surviving pieces of historical evidence; and the writer’s creative reconstruction of what MacAdams “may well have” done. These strands are secured within a fourth device, a richly figured historical context. There are descriptions—including those of family and friends and of soldiers and battle—that range across wide geographical spaces to detail specific locations. Social class and gender divisions that determined lifestyles and work are illuminated. The habits, assumptions, and conditions of the time are further illustrated through the use of photographs, period poems, and even recipes for such items as ginger bread, tomato soup, and disinfectant.

Marshall succeeds in establishing that MacAdams deserves remembrance. This is a portrait of a capable, caring, and historically significant individual. She served as one of the first two women elected to a legislature in the British Empire—both, incidentally, in Alberta. She was the only female soldier’s representative to be elected. She was the first woman to table a bill in a legislature anywhere in the British Empire. Perhaps most importantly, by dint of Marshall’s work, MacAdams stands, however unwillingly, as a worthy representative of the many intimate witnesses of war, loss, and the troubling disparities of her time.