If you wanted to protest with your plate, what foods would you choose?
From boycotts to cookbooks, food has been a powerful means for ordinary people to advocate for the world that they want to see. As protests erupt around the world against right-wing, patriarchal, white supremacist leaders and their policies, we wanted to learn more about how ordinary people have used their community and creativity to spark change throughout history.
Welcome to Part Two of the story exploring how foods have fed and supported protests, revolutions, and resistance throughout history.
Kitchen Campaigning: How Suffrage Cookbooks Promoted Voting Rights
In 1920, women were granted the right to vote. At least that’s what we learn. But actually, women fought tooth and nail and WON the right to vote bolstered by the advocacy work of women of color. In the end, white women won the right to vote, but the women of color who helped fight for these rights were ultimately excluded from the 19th Amendment. For women, food was not just a duty but a source of agency and power.
From the 1880s to 1920 — when the 19th Amendment was ratified — women utilized a new tool at their disposal to argue the case for voting rights: community cookbooks. After the Civil War community cookbooks rose in popularity with public access to easy and inexpensive printing services. The first, A Poetical Cook Book, compiled by Maria J. Moss in 1864, raised charitable funds to help Union veterans injured during the Civil War. Taking a page from this model, advocates and community organizers began to publish and sell cookbooks as part of their communications and fundraising efforts for women’s suffrage.
The fight for voting rights relied on community contributions, carefully crafted arguments, and (ironically) leaning into gender norms. Women’s political advocacy leveraged networks of ordinary women, well-crafted arguments, and gender norms through suffrage cookbooks to advance their cause.
Gathering In the Kitchen: Contributions to Community Cookbooks
From simpler recipes on preparing tea to complex dishes found at fine dining establishments such as meringue cakes, suffrage cookbooks relied on the expertise of ordinary women. At a time when women did not have any legal control over the household’s finances, submitting recipes or compiling the cookbooks were ways for average women to contribute to the cause.
Suffrage cookbooks relied on the expertise of ordinary women.
The community-sourced nature of the suffrage cookbooks likely became a selling point as they published a breadth of knowledge tried and tested by housewives. One cookbook even used this opportunity as a way for readers to acknowledge and celebrate their own expertise by including blank pages for documenting their own recipes. At a time when food science and nutrition were just entering public consciousness, the cookbooks positioned the readers as experts in their own right.
Contributions from average women allowed the suffrage movement to reach new audiences. Sold door-to-door or at fairs, bazaars, and women’s exchanges (nonprofit consignment stores), women’s associations relied on the power of community to sell suffrage cookbooks by recruiting their members as salespeople. By leveraging the skills accumulated through generations of women and years of testing recipes, the suffrage movement gained access to minds that were not already convinced of the cause.
By leveraging the skills accumulated through generations of women and years of testing recipes, the suffrage movement gained access to minds that were not already convinced of the cause.
Beyond the Recipes: Racial Exclusion from Suffrage Cookbooks
More than just a collection of recipes, these cookbooks were also a reflection of the women who compiled them. Notably absent from the contributors to suffrage cookbooks were women of color and working class women. Women of color and working class women would have faced barriers of literacy and access to publishing houses, barriers requiring education, money, and access to printing presses.
The recipes, household tips, childrearing advice, and political arguments heavily pushed an aspirational life for upper and middle-class white women. Women with the time and resources to utilize chafing dishes and make a bechamel sauce. These were not the women toiling in others’ homes or factories all day. Recipes reflected New England food culture of the time: celebrating British and French cuisine. The dishes and cookbooks as a whole excluded the diversity of American women advocating for suffrage.
Unfortunately, only a handful of suffrage cookbooks and recipe pamphlets have survived and those that do only reflect affluent white communities. It is unclear whether other women’s organizations, like the National Association for Colored Women (NACW), active in the fight for suffrage at the time compiled and sold cookbooks to support social causes.
Organizations like the NACW were active in all aspects of uplifting Black women’s lives from advocating for temperance and prohibition as methods to combat lynchings and domestic violence to establishing community daycares. Black women had extensive politically active networks through churches and women’s associations along with generations of domestic labor both through slavery and as paid professionals.
Given Black women’s powerful community organizing and the popularity of community cookbooks at the time, it is likely that Black women used food to fundraise for social issues including suffrage, but whether that was through methods like published cookbooks or through gatherings like bake sales remains unclear. We do know that churches and associations would later be documented as transformative sites of Black women’s fundraising and community activism.
From Cooking to Congress: Making the Case for Women’s Civic Participation
Suffrage cookbooks not only presented lofty arguments for women’s right to vote, they also recognized women as civic participants with a unique skillset and knowledge. By embracing the gender norms and expectations of the time — women as wife, mother, and keeper of the household’s morality — suffrage cookbooks could both repaint public perception of suffragettes and make the case that each woman reading the cookbook had something valuable to offer in civic life.
Suffrage cookbooks made the case that each woman reading the cookbook had something valuable to offer in civic life.
Combating public perceptions of suffragettes as bad wives and mothers, suffragette cookbooks instead utilized social expectations that women would be in charge of the household meals. Women could fulfill these expectations and vote. Suffrage cookbooks provided an accessible opportunity for women to learn about the political movement by reaching them where they were, which was more often than not, the kitchen.
In fact, suffrage cookbooks argued that women’s perspective on household management and food provided a unique stake and perspective on matters of household economics, children’s issues, and health and food safety. The appeal to women as informed wives and mothers publicly recognized the importance of women’s work within the home as important on the national stage.
“Women do not ask for the ballot as a right or a privilege, but the social and political conditions of today make it necessary that women be given the ballot to do their work in the world as they have always done.” – Miss Jane Addams, Washington Women's Cook Book, 1909 (right)
The perspective was bolstered by quotes, arguments, and even recipes contributed by educated and professional women, advocates, and politicians. Notable figures like Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross), abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the governors of states which had ratified women’s right to vote provided excerpts for the community cookbooks. Not only did these arguments utilize the power of celebrity and position, but they also highlighted the remarkable accomplishments of suffragettes.
The appeal to women as informed wives and mothers publicly recognized the importance of women’s work within the home as important on the national stage.
Satiating with Satire: Creatively Crafting a Political Message
Rather than preaching about a cause to women, suffrage cookbooks invited readers to join the cause with clever satire and appealing to a sense of common experiences as women.
Political recipes like the “Pie for a Suffragist's Doubting Husband” and “Anti’s Favorite Hash,” drew attention to common objections to women’s suffrage and highlighted causes that the women’s associations identified as important to women. At the same time, presenting tongue-and-cheek recommendations on how women could appeal to their husbands or ignore men who might be indifferent to or actively against women’s suffrage.
By harnessing the creativity and expertise of ordinary women, suffrage cookbooks were a compelling material in the fight for women’s right to vote. Using community networks, the expertise and contributions of ordinary women, and creatively emphasizing the socially acceptable roles of women as wives and mothers helped recruit new women to their cause. Just as women of color were eventually excluded from the rights ratified by the 19th Amendment, their voices and the diversity of American food cultures were omitted from suffrage cookbooks and the historical record of the suffrage movement.
Suffragettes not only used their community as a political asset, but they also harnessed the political power of cookbooks and ordinary people to promote their cause.
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