Description
"[Marshall's] work in responding to the challenge of exploring a little-known life should be an inspiration to other students of history … people across Canada will find it a pleasant way to become better acquainted with an attractive, interesting and unfamiliar contributor to our history." - Desmond Morton, McGill University
Give Your Other Vote to the Sister tells the story of Roberta MacAdams, the first woman elected to the Alberta legislature. In fact, she was one of the first two women elected to a legislature anywhere in the British Empire. Her triumph was extraordinary for many reasons. Not only did she run while serving as a nursing sister overseas during the Great War, but over 90 per cent of her electors were men - Alberta soldiers stationed in England and in the muddy trenches of the Western Front. Give Your Other Vote to the Sister describes MacAdams' journey overseas, her work at a large military hospital in London, and the personal sacrifices she endured during the war. It also chronicles Debbie Marshall's own journey to reclaim MacAdams' life, one that took her across Canada and to the places where MacAdams lived and worked in England and France. It was a search that would change her own perceptions about how and why so may women willingly participated in the world's first "great war."
Awards
- Short-listed, Canadian Author's Association - Alberta Branch Exporting Alberta Award 2008
- Short-listed, Exporting Alberta Award, Canadian Authors’ Association - Alberta Branch 2008
Reviews
This delightful study of Roberta MacAdams, the first of two women elected to the Alberta legislature in 1917, is a good read . . . Marshall is a talented writer.
—Laurel Sefton MacDowell, University of Toronto Quarterly
This is an engaging book that is equally valuable for the classroom and for personal enjoyment . . . [it] demonstrates ably that the work of recuperation still has value, as does the study of individual lives.
—Randi R. Warne, The Canadian Historical Review
Fascinating and poignant
—Carol Harrison, GoodReads