The women's suffrage movement in the United States incorporated culinary activities, including bake sales and the compilation of cookbooks, as a strategy for fundraising and promoting their objective of securing voting rights. This approach also aimed to strengthen connections among women involved in the movement while addressing public perceptions.
Culinary Activities as a Strategy
Suffragists utilized bake sales and the creation of cookbooks as dual methods to advance their cause. These activities generated funds and raised awareness for women's voting rights, while also acknowledging and integrating women's traditional roles in the household.
Fundraising Through Bake Sales
Bake sales, featuring items such as cookies, cakes, pies, and "kiss cakes," were conducted in various locations, including Salt Lake City and across the Western United States. The funds generated from these sales supported suffragists' travel to advocate for women's rights nationwide.
Cookbooks for Advocacy and Awareness
Cookbooks compiled by suffragists served to raise public awareness for the movement. According to Juli McLoone, curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan, these culinary compilations were considered "one piece of the strategy."
These cookbooks reflected an emphasis on respecting women's domestic labor, addressing aspects such as housekeeping, childcare, and broader community responsibilities. The perspective was that efficient and skillful domestic management could enable women to engage in civic duties. While some suffragists advocated for women to increase their presence outside the home, many did not seek to entirely abandon their domestic roles.
An example is The Suffrage Cook Book, published in 1915 by the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania. This publication included a recipe for ginger cookies, testimonials from governors of states where women had already secured voting rights (primarily in the Western states), and a recipe described as a method for encouraging husbands' support for women's suffrage.
Addressing Public Perception
The use of bake sales and cookbooks played a role in reframing public perception of women suffragists. These efforts helped counter criticisms that sometimes depicted suffragists as unladylike or neglectful of their families, presenting an alternative image that integrated traditional female roles with their advocacy.
Challenges in Recreating Historical Recipes
Attempts to recreate suffrage-era recipes have presented difficulties due to historical differences in cooking practices and ingredient availability. Recipes from publications like the 1880s Woman's Exponent, a suffragist newspaper, often specified ingredients by weight (e.g., pounds for flour and butter) rather than modern volume measurements (cups). Additionally, some ingredients are no longer commonly available.
Cooking instructions frequently lacked specific temperatures or times; for instance, recipes from the 1880s, when cast iron stoves made precise temperature control challenging, often used general terms such as "a quick oven." Recreations of 1885 "kiss cakes," for example, resulted in items that were less sweet than contemporary cookies and lacked modern decorative elements.