The cookies that fueled votes for women

The long fight for voting rights for women in America had some delicious twists. Suffragists often raised money for their activities with bake sales and by compiling cookbooks to sell. While it might seem counterintuitive for women to bake cookies and share recipes while trying to be taken seriously outside of the home, it was actually an effective way to strengthen ties among women and advance their cause.

We wanted to get a sense of what the suffrage bake sales looked and tasted like, but found that the recipes were hard to recreate. In the recipes printed in the Woman’s Exponent, a suffragist newspaper in Salt Lake City, the flour and butter were measured by the pound, not the cup. The recipes call for ingredients that are hard to come by today. They also don’t specify cooking temperatures or time.

“In the 1880s, most people in America were cooking with the old cast iron stove,” said Juli McLoone, curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan. It’s hard to get a precise temperature in an oven heated by wood or coal, so the recipes would simply say, “a quick oven.”

Undaunted, we tried baking some kiss cakes from 1885. The result didn’t have the pizazz of cookies with multicolored sprinkles and frosting, and they weren’t nearly as sweet as the cookies we eat today. But they were cute.

Cookies, cakes, pies and treats like these little kiss cakes were sold at bake sales around Salt Lake City and all over the West. The proceeds helped suffragists crisscross the country to make their case for women’s rights.

Compiling recipes into cookbooks also let suffragists raise awareness for their cause while highlighting their roles in their families as cooks. “They were definitely one piece of the strategy,” McLoone says.

A spirit of respect for the work of women permeates the cookbooks. Women’s associations of the time were concerned with lifting each other in multiple ways, like housekeeping, childcare and larger community duties.

“If you are doing your housekeeping very efficiently and skillfully, then you also have time for civic responsibility,” McLoone said.

And while some women’s suffragists wanted women out of kitchens entirely, McLoone says most weren’t trying to abandon their roles in their homes.

We were a little less willing to closely follow the recipe for ginger cookies that appeared in The Suffrage Cook Book, published by the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania in 1915, after the underwhelming kiss cakes. Thankfully, cooking flour and molasses into a kind of gingerbread has been a tried and true hit since Hansel and Gretel.

This particular cookbook also included testimonials from governors of states where women could already vote — mostly states in the West. And it had a cheeky recipe for convincing husbands to support the idea of women’s suffrage.

Women suffragists were often ridiculed as strident, unladylike shrews who were bad mothers and wives. The bake sales and the cookbooks, the kiss cakes and quick ovens helped turn that story around.