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.
Cathleen D. Cahill, discusses her upcoming book, Recasting The Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, which 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-Ša), 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.
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Photo courtesy of Michael T. Davis
Cathleen D. Cahill received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2004 and has fond memories of living in that city for almost a decade. She is now an associate professor of History at Penn State University, and the author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press 2020). Her first book, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (UNC 2011), won the Labriola Center for American Indian National Book Award and was finalist for the David J. Weber and Bill Clements Book Prize. She is also steering committee chair for the Coalition for Western Women's History.
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