Recasting the Vote

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372 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 24 halftones, notes, bibl., index

E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-5933-6
Published: September 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-5932-9
Published: November 2020
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6612-9
Published: August 2021
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5432-2
Published: September 2020

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Awards & distinctions

Honorable Mention, 2020 Armitage-Jameson Prize, Coalition for Western Women's History

Honorable Mention, 2022 President's Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

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-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.

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.

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.
For more information about Cathleen D. Cahill, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"This spirited history situates the campaign for female suffrage within the broader narrative of civil rights. . . . Cahill's widened focus links the battle for enfranchisement to currents of exclusion and empowerment that continue to shape the vote today."—New Yorker

"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

"This book has set the bar for understanding the historical implications of the suffrage movement through the eyes of women of color in early twentieth-century America. . . . [A]n exquisite monograph."—Journal of American Ethnic History

“Cahill has done a remarkable job of not only expanding the suffrage narrative, but successfully reorienting it . . . [this is] a text with the power to fundamentally change popular perspectives of the suffrage movement.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Recasting the Vote is an essential read for specialists in the field and newcomers alike. . . . a field-changing history.”—Southwestern Historical Quarterly

"Cathleen D. Cahill's narrative-supplanting book . . . challenges the reductive, whitewashed accounts of how the 19th amendment was ratcheted through the political process. . . . Cahill's text doesn't merely add minority figures to the story of women's enfranchisement, it proves it is impossible to tell the story without them."—Tribal College Journal