Suffragists' Fundraising and Advocacy Through Culinary Activities
The women's suffrage movement in America incorporated culinary activities, such as bake sales and the compilation of cookbooks, as methods for fundraising and promoting their cause. This approach aimed to strengthen connections among women while advancing their objective of securing voting rights.
Challenges in Recreating Historical Recipes
Attempts to recreate suffrage-era recipes have encountered difficulties. Recipes found in publications like the 1880s Woman's Exponent, a suffragist newspaper, specify ingredients by weight (e.g., pounds for flour and butter) rather than modern volume measurements (cups). Additionally, some ingredients are no longer commonly available, and cooking instructions often lack specific temperatures or times.
Juli McLoone, curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan, notes that cooking in the 1880s often involved cast iron stoves, which made precise temperature control challenging. Consequently, recipes frequently used general terms such as "a quick oven."
For instance, recreating 1885 "kiss cakes" resulted in items that were less sweet than contemporary cookies and lacked modern decorative elements.
Impact of Bake Sales and Cookbooks
Bake sales, held in locations such as Salt Lake City and across the Western United States, generated funds that supported suffragists' travel to advocate for women's rights nationwide.
The creation of cookbooks also served as a dual strategy. It allowed suffragists to raise awareness for their movement while simultaneously acknowledging and highlighting women's traditional roles within their households as cooks. According to McLoone, these culinary compilations were "one piece of the strategy."
The cookbooks reflected an emphasis on respecting women's domestic labor. Women's associations of the era focused on mutual support in areas such as housekeeping, childcare, and broader community responsibilities. McLoone explained that efficient and skillful housekeeping was viewed as enabling women to engage in civic duties.
While some suffragists advocated for women's increased presence outside the home, most did not seek to abandon their domestic roles entirely.
An example is The Suffrage Cook Book, published in 1915 by the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania. This cookbook included a recipe for ginger cookies and featured testimonials from governors of states where women had already secured the right to vote, primarily in the Western states. It also contained a recipe described as a method for encouraging husbands' support for women's suffrage.
These bake sales and cookbooks played a role in reframing public perception of women suffragists, addressing common criticisms that depicted them as unladylike or neglectful of their families.