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Dave Mullington’s biography of the gutsy Charlotte Whitton, who became the first woman mayor of a major Canadian city when she was elected in Ottawa in 1951, has a surprising twist. His take on the passionate, outspoken social-reform advocate who broke barriers and succeeded because of a take-no-prisoners approach is oddly dispassionate.

Most famous for saying that “Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult,” Whitton remains a fascinating study in contradictions. A foremother of Canada’s child welfare protection laws as executive secretary of the Canadian Council on Social Welfare in 1926, Whitton was a lifelong conservative, a conservationist, a supporter of equal pay for women, and a welfare consultant who disparaged Manitoba’s degenerate “white trash” population.

Whitton also occupies a place in gay history. Her twenty-year relationship with Margaret Grier has been politely dubbed a “Boston marriage.” Mullington acknowledges that the two were treated as a couple, but then insists “there was nothing to suggest the women’s relationship was a sexual one.”

Happily, Whitton’s unsterile life manages to leap from the page, in spite of Mullington’s effort to keep her within the more comfortable margins of history.