by Cathleen D Cahill
University of North Carolina P
8/1/2021
SKU: 9781469666129
We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina Nina Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains.
Reviews:
"Recasting the Vote tells the story of women's suffrage with the women of today in mind. Through probing research and vivid storytelling, Cathleen Cahill unearths how women of color charted their own routes to voting rights, transforming a movement. Their lives speak to our own time through timely lessons about how racism and sexism can undercut women's political power. This is the book we have long been waiting for and that we need."--Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted Upon Equality for All
"Cahill explodes the conventional story that suffrage was a white, middle-class women's movement. Vividly written through biographies of individual women of color, Recasting the Vote shows how black, Latina, Native American, and Chinese American suffragists changed the course of struggles for both women's rights and racial justice."--Mae M. Ngai, author of The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
Written to coincide with the centennial of the 19th Amendment, this important book reminds us that the familiar stories of women's suffrage are woefully incomplete. . . . An essential work; highly recommended for scholars of the period and general readers interested in women's history.-- Library Journal
About the Author:
Cathleen D. Cahill is associate professor of history at Penn State University and the author of Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933, winner of the 2011 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award and finalist for the 2012 David J. Weber-Clements Prize, Western History Association.