[1] Her father was the eldest son of Edward Hamlin Adams, a Jamaican-born banker and merchant who made his money overseas before settling in Britain.

[7] She became a well known speaker and she addressed a number of suffrage societies,[7] including a two-week speaking tour around Birmingham in 1908,[4][7] and other areas in 'the North' often by bicycle and sketching her experiences.

Abadam was one of the signatories (including, among others Edith How Martyn, Charlotte Despard, Theresa Billington-Greig, Marion Coates-Hansen, and Irene Miller) to a letter to Emmeline Pankhurst explaining their disquiet on 14 September 1907,[10] and establishing the alternative Women's Freedom League.

[11] Her outspokenness and open criticism of clergy, including Father Henry Day, who opposed votes for women, led to a label for Abadam as 'arrogant' and 'paranoid' and her followers were called 'Abadamites' in another Catholic publication, Universe.

[4] In 1920, she founded the Feminist League with a wide debating agenda and lending library on topics related to feminism but also including freemasonry, embryology and witches.

[6] In the 1920s the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society (which had become the St. Joan's International Alliance) promoted the Equal Franchise Bill and celebrated its passing into law in 1928, with a Mass in Westminster Cathedral and a procession of Protestant and Catholic suffragists including Millicent Fawcett, Charlotte Despard, Virginia Crawford, Elisabeth Christitch, Leonara di Alberti, and Abadam (then aged 72).

Abadam also left an education legacy to pay for boarding school for her great niece Margaret Vaughan, who was four years old at her death.

[4] Vaughan said at the centenary of some women getting the right to vote through the Representation of the People Act 1918, that her family's view of Abadam was “Everybody thought she was incredible clever and noble and she gave so much to feminism.