A Reconstructed World: A Feminist Biography of Gertrude Richardson

Margaret Conrad is the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair of Women’s Studies
at Mount Saint Vincent University, editor of Intimate Relations: Family
and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800, and co-author of The
Joy of Ginger.

This is a remarkable book about a remarkable woman. In any age but our
own, it would never have appeared in print—in part because of the
paucity of sources, but also because Richardson’s life ended in
tragedy before she achieved “greatness” in the public sphere.
Fortunately, feminist biography, a genre of recent vintage, has rescued
Richardson from obscurity. Rejecting claims to objectivity, the
authoritarian voice, and a preoccupation with public achievement,
feminist biographers opt for deep contextual reading, an emotional
engagement with the subject, and a balanced assessment of public and
private lives. Feminist biography at its worst can become tediously
preoccupied with the personal; but at its best, as is the case here, it
engages the reader in ways that traditional biographies rarely manage to
do.

In Gertrude Richardson, Barbara Roberts found a subject whose story
reflected her own interests in feminism and pacifism, but who also
challenged her research skills and abilities to empathize. Richardson
was born to a working-class family in Leicester, England, and became
deeply engaged in the feminist and pacifist movements both before and
after emigrating to a farming community near Swan River, Manitoba, in
1911. Ten years later, she was committed to a mental institution, where
she remained off and on (but mostly on) for the rest of her
extraordinary life.

Richardson left behind a paper trail, but it was an unusual one,
consisting of poems, newspaper articles, and case reports from mental
institutions. Through family letters and oral testimony, Roberts pieces
together Richardson’s private life, but it is in her splendid
sleuthing in the public sphere of socialist, feminist, and pacifist
organizations, and in the reconstruction of the intense political
context created by the South African and First World Wars, that she
makes real sense of Richardson’s motivation. At times the individual
gets lost in the context, but readers learn a great deal about early
20th-century counterculture in this engaging and lovingly researched
book, which deserved better from its proofreader(s).