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

This delightful study of Roberta MacAdams, the first of two women elected to the Alberta legislature in 1917, is a good read. As MacAdams left few papers, the author, Debbie Marshall, displays remarkable tenacity, imagination, and curiosity in tracking down her story. Her technique of interlacing her own research trips in search of the past and Roberta MacAdams’s life with the historical narrative works well and displays the trials and adventures of a persistent historical researcher.

Born in 1880 in Sarnia, Ontario, to a middle-class family, Roberta MacAdams grew to be a refined and self-contained young woman, with a traditional view of gender roles in society that her experience in the Great War would change. After high school, as she did not marry at a young age, she attended the Macdonald Institute in Guelph, which grew out of Adelaide Hoodless’s efforts to promote domestic science. With this training and at her brother’s invitation, Roberta headed to Edmonton, where she taught rural women new skills and helped them establish women’s institutes, which she briefly oversaw as their first superintendent. In 1912 she worked as the supervisor of household science for Edmonton’s public schools, where she administered a large staff and handled budgets.

But it was her work in the war that made MacAdams a public figure and formed her ideas. In 1916, she was appointed dietitian of the Ontario Government Military Hospital, built in Orpington, Kent. There she budgeted and planned menus and supervised the preparation of about 3,500 meals a day for patients arriving from the front.

Marshall is a talented writer and very good at evoking the atmosphere and issues that were important to men and women living through the Great War with bits of detail or well-situated excerpts from letters. The role of women in the war was important, and the nursing sisters, ambulance drivers, and other women like Roberta gave care and comfort to the soldiers.

In 1916 the Alberta legislature gave women the right to vote. In preparation for the 1917 provincial election, the government passed legislation that gave soldiers and nurses their own constituency, with two members-at-large to represent them. In June 1917 Louise McKinney was the first woman in the British Empire to be elected to office. The overseas vote was in September. The urgent pressure from Beatrice Nasmyth, a Canadian feminist working in London, persuaded Roberta that she had a duty to the soldiers and to the women making sacrifices for the war back home and that she should run for one of the two overseas legislature seats. Her campaign leaflet with its handsome portrait and slogan, ‘Give one vote to the man of your choice and the other to the sister,’ did the trick. MacAdams beat twenty male candidates and won the seat. She served for one term, during which she toured the front lines with several female journalists, chaperoned war brides coming to Canada, made speeches in the legislature and to many groups about the sacrifices the warriors were making, and stressed the need for a program of reconstruction at the war’s end to help the survivors readjust to civilian life. She also focused her legislative interests on social welfare measures, which included more teacher training, better hospitals, and measures to rebuild society. ‘The once-hesitant feminist’ at the end of the war ‘encouraged women to use their new political muscle to bring about social change.’ For a time she directed the home branch of the Soldier Settlement Board in Alberta helping soldiers’ wives to adjust to new lives in rural Alberta.

The book ends happily. Although Roberta did not run for re-election, she did marry, had one son, and she and her husband settled on a farm in the Peace River country. Having worked comfortably mostly with men all her life in interesting jobs, she decided to ‘walk...