Recasting the Vote

As a professional historian for 40 years, I enjoy books that transform my understanding of our nation’s past. I also love strong female characters who are not well known but who contributed powerfully to social and political change.

Cahill provides a lively and beautifully crafted story of six women of color who fought for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and then continued their efforts as federal and state governments sought to exclude women of color from the ballot box after 1920.

Although these Native American, Spanish American, African American, and Chinese American suffragists embraced common goals, they employed distinct arguments… show more.

Cathleen Cahill explodes the conventional history of women’s suffrage by tracing the stories of suffragists of color from 1890 to 1928. Analyzing the efforts of African American, Native American, Mexican, and Chinese American activists, Cahill shifts the focus away from each group’s interactions with white suffragists and explores, instead, the commonalities and differences among women of color. She interweaves compelling vignettes of individual suffragists, including Carrie Williams Clifford, Nina Otero-Warren, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, with the larger issues addressed in their communities. In wielding dynamic analyses of these communities of color, Cahill creates a powerful new narrative of the long… show more.

Recasting the Vote retells the familiar story of the movement for women’s suffrage with a new cast of characters and an expanded set of goals. Focusing on Indigenous, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American activists, Cathleen Cahill places the fight for women’s voting rights within the context of BIPOC communities’ struggles for self-determination. For these women, the battle for women’s suffrage was connected to protests against lynching and segregation and demands for tribal self-government and freedom of religion, among other issues. By highlighting the work of Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford,… show more.

Too often textbooks and documentaries recount the stories of white women who fought for the vote, but Cathleen Cahill’s Recasting the Vote spotlights six women of color who led the movement. Yes, I know, Cahill’s book isn’t a traditional biography of one figure, but I promise this collective biography offers a thought-provoking look at their remarkable lives. The book highlights three Native American women who fought for gender equality and for Native American rights: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), and Laura Cornelius Kellogg. Black activist Carrie Williams Clifford, Chinese-American suffragist and scholar Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and… show more.

White suffrage leaders like Alice Paul and Helen Hamilton Gardner found it expedient to focus on gaining the vote for white women. Rather than presenting women of color as passive victims of racism, Cahill reveals many of the unsung leaders of the movement, representing a wide range of women (including Native Americans, Asian Americans, and various immigrant groups as well as African Americans). Their efforts, their gains and their losses, reveal much about the ongoing struggle for civil rights, and provide a different aspect of the limits and strengths of the wide-ranging suffrage movement.