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

Reviewed by: Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman's Journey into the Great War Randi R. Warne Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman's Journey into the Great War. Debbie Marshall. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. Pp. 348, $29.95 paper In this original volume, author Debbie Marshall provides the reader with two intertwined stories. The foundational story is that of the life of Roberta McAdam, the first woman elected to the Alberta Legislature, and one of the first two women elected to legislative office in the British Empire. Interwoven with this narrative is Marshall's own story of the painstaking process by which McAdam's story was recuperated. Both are worthy in their own right. [End Page 424] Marshall's quest to 'reclaim Roberta McAdam's life' (xv) began with having to write a short biography on McAdam for the 'Great War' section of a CD-ROM on Alberta history. Despite McAdam's political significance, very little archival material had been preserved about her. Spurred by her own experiences as an activist student in Toronto in the 1980s, and curious about McAdam's life and accomplishments, Marshall physically traced McAdam's own journey, from her early years in Sarnia, ON, to Stony Plain and then Edmonton, AB, to France, where McAdam served as a nursing sister with expertise in nutrition, then back to Edmonton, where McAdam served as an MLA. In the process, Marshall was able to unearth further information about McAdam's life, which she ably translates into imaginative reconstructions of conversations, thoughts, and possibilities that led McAdam to her place in history. While hypothetical, these recreations are supported by evidence, and Marshall is careful not to overstep its boundaries. The result is a textured account of a period that will satisfy those familiar with the history and also be accessible to the general reader. McAdam's election was made possible by the Alberta Military Representation Act, which gave soldiers in the field two votes. McAdam's mandate was thus to advocate for soldiers, particularly as they attempted to adjust to postwar life. A particular strength of Marshall's narrative is her careful treatment of the human costs and contexts of the Great War and its aftermath. A further strength is her attention to the work of women, particularly nursing sisters, in the field of battle, experience that, in Marshall's account, deeply informed McAdam's political decisions and actions. Marshall's volume thus serves as a corrective to mainstream treatments of the Great War, focusing as they still do primarily on men and battles, with women off to the side, symbolically 'keeping the home fires burning' (vi–vii). One of the lasting contributions of this text is the questions it provokes about historical reconstructions of this period. McAdam's status as a 'woman worthy' would suggest to many that she ought to have been a feminist, yet she was herself not particularly supportive of women getting the vote. As a professional, she benefited from improvements in women's status, yet had not participated in the struggle to achieve those changes. She undoubtedly does not fit into the ubiquitous (and unfortunate) categories of 'maternal feminist' or 'rights feminists' that seem requisite for describing public women of this period. A reluctant politician, she nevertheless came from a family that was deeply politically engaged. Marshall's attentive rendering of these contradictions is another one of the book's strengths. [End Page 425] In sum, this is an engaging book that is equally valuable for the classroom and for personal enjoyment and edification. There are some small quibbles: an occasional sentence fragment; confusing use of italicized passages for both historical commentary and personal commentary; at least one failure to cite a quotation's source (79); repetition in citation from what archival materials are available. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile work that demonstrates ably that the work of recuperation still has value, as does the study of individual lives. Randi R. Warne Mount Saint Vincent University Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.