My first exposure to the women’s suffrage movement was through the character of Mrs. Banks in the movie Mary Poppins. Mrs. Banks makes her grand entrance wearing a “Votes for Women” sash, singing about how she and her sister suffragettes are throwing off the shackles of women’s oppression. But it turns out Mrs. Banks is a villain: While she has been out marching, she has neglected her children, who have run away (again), causing their nanny to quit in despair. It’s true that equal blame could be given to Mr. Banks, who is something of a workaholic, but at least his long hours at the bank pay the household expenses. What does Mrs. Banks have to show for her time away from her sacred duty as a mother?
Mary Poppins came out in 1964, long after women got the right to vote both in the U.K. and the U.S., but Mrs. Banks embodies many of the Victorian arguments against women’s suffrage (and, incidentally, 1960s — and 2020s — arguments against women having jobs): If women began taking part in public life, who would take care of life at home? Men and children, as everyone knows, are completely incapable of caring for themselves. The children would run amok! They would starve! The men would also starve! Society would collapse! All because women wanted to have five minutes alone in a booth with a ballot.
Male hysteria was not the only concern of the early suffragists. They also needed money to run their campaigns and publish their newspapers and organize their marches. Fortunately, a model for women’s fundraising already existed. During the Civil War, women eager to do their patriotic duty for the war effort took a good, hard look at their own practical skills. They couldn’t fight or hold public office and many of them didn’t have money of their own, but they knew how to cook. They could bake cakes. They could make pickles and jam. They could compile their best recipes into cookbooks. And then they could sell these things for money that they wouldn’t have to turn over to their husbands.
For suffragists, selling food and community cookbooks served another purpose: This very public focus on food proved that they were not neglecting their womanly duties. Far from it! Even though many of the contributors to these cookbooks were prominent teachers, physicians, writers, and ministers, they still knew the proper way to run a home and, what’s more, they had professional training. As Hattie A. Burr, the editor of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, notes in her introduction, “A book with so unique and notable a list of contributors, vouched for by such undoubted authority, has never before been given to the public.”
See? The suffrage campaign wasn’t taking away from the men and children of America. It was giving them this precious gift.
(It’s possible, given how they emphasized their professional achievements outside the kitchen, that some of the contributors considered this strategy slightly retrograde. And yet, even now, after more than a century of women’s suffrage, Kamala Harris’s campaign is touting her cooking skills to signify that no matter how tough she can be, she’s also still “Momala.”)
Between 1886 and 1920, when American women finally got the right to vote, suffrage groups around the country published a number of these cookbooks. I say “a number” because no one is sure exactly how many. Copies of six full-length books survive, along with two pamphlets, but there could have been more. The Woman Suffrage Cook Book was the first, published in Boston in 1886 and reprinted in 1890 by the staff of the Woman’s Journal, a weekly newspaper “devoted to the interests of Woman … especially her right of Suffrage.” Both editions were sold exclusively at suffrage fundraising events.
The contributors were mostly, as one newspaper noted, “women in whose veins ran some of the best blood of New England,” though there were some outliers from places like Chicago, San Antonio, and Arredondo, Florida. They presumably also had the “best blood” running through their veins, meaning that they were white, Protestant, and born in the United States. Some abandoned “Miss” or “Mrs.” in favor of their professional titles or, simply, their names. A much smaller minority preferred to be known as Mrs. [Husband’s Name]. A few credited their contributions to their housekeepers. They liked gingerbread (there were six recipes for that), brown bread (five), and catsup (four recipes for tomato and one each for plum and cucumber). The longest section of the book by far is “Cakes.”
Some of the recipes are brisk, nearly telegraphic, like this contribution by Mrs. Mary J. Willis for Currant Pie: “One cupful ripe currants, one cupful sugar and one egg well beaten. Stir in the currants. Bake between two crusts.” It is generally assumed that everyone understands how ingredients should be combined. There are no exact cooking temperatures because ovens at the time didn’t have thermostats; you measured heat by how long you could keep your hand inside before it got too uncomfortable. There are no exact measurements, either; quantities of butter were described as “the size of an egg” and a “cup” was any old teacup you happened to have handy. This was still a decade before Fannie Farmer and The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, which declared once and for all that a “cup” was eight fluid ounces or 16 tablespoons.
In short, the 19th-century kitchen was quite different from the 21st. Some of the recipes here give a sense of what daily life must have been like for these women. Kitchen work was hard, sweaty labor. Stoves had to be lit first thing in the morning and the ashes had to be carried out at night. Dough needed to be mixed and kneaded by hand. Let’s not even discuss canning. But there was also adventure and swashbuckling: Anna Ella Carroll’s instructions “To Cook Terrapin” begin, ”Decidedly the terrapin has to be killed before cooking, and killing is often no easy matter. The head must be cut off, and as the sight is peculiarly acute, the cook must exercise great ingenuity in concealing the deadly weapon.” (And if things got too exciting, Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D., had this bit of advice: “Even a bleeding artery will cease flowing when in hot water.”)
But, even with the restrictions of the recipe form, some of the women’s personalities shine through. My favorite recurring character was Alice B. Stockham, M.D., of Chicago, a strong proponent of whole-grain flours who was unafraid to make her opinions known. Consider her recipe for rhubarb toast: “Never use white bread for toast,” she advises, “when bread of the unbolted or entire wheat flour can be had. The latter never become doughy, and is much better flavoured, besides being more nutritious.” A quick Google search reveals that Stockham, an obstetrician, was the fifth licensed female doctor in the U.S. She was also a militant vegetarian and an unconventional birth control activist: She rejected devices in favor of her own personal philosophy based on tantric sex techniques she learned about while traveling in India (though, in a pinch, masturbation would also do). When she was 72, she was arrested for distributing indecent material. She sounds like she would have been fun to eat rhubarb toast with.
I also grew fond of Matilda Joslyn Gage, who advises in her baked tomatoes recipe, “If rightly baked, the tomatoes, when done, will be imbedded [sic] in a rich, luscious jelly. If you do not succeed the first time, try again; they are worth the trouble.” Kindness and optimism are two nice qualities to have in the kitchen. I learned that Gage was an activist and scholar of witchcraft, among other things, and the namesake of the “Matilda effect,” when men get credit for women’s inventions. She was also the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum, who used her as one of the models for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and borrowed her idea that there might be good witches as well as bad ones.
The sections about caring for invalids and miscellaneous household advice are especially opinionated and sometimes contradictory, proving that the suffrage movement welcomed all points of view. Dr. Vesta Miller advises, “Do not continually think and talk about your diseases; keeping the mind on a weakness makes one feel worse.” Clemence S. Lozier, M.D., suggests red pepper as an adequate substitute for “alcoholic stimulants.” (Or one could prepare Mrs. A.A. Miner’s nonalcoholic “communion wine.”) Mary J. Stafford, M.D., by contrast, combines a screed against pepper with a pep talk for soups. Meanwhile, Frances Willard, the longtime president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, predicts a new diet for the 20th century: “Entire wheat-flour bread, vegetables, fruit, fish with a little meat, and milk as the chief drink, will distill in the alembic of the digestive organs, into pure, rich, feverless blood, electric but steady nerves, and brains that can ‘think God’s thoughts after Him,’ as they have never yet been thought.”
It was difficult for me to choose a recipe to cook, mostly because of translation issues and unfamiliar ingredients (what is St. Louis flour?), but also because some of the recipes seemed designed for large families or maybe even entire communities. Mother’s Election Cake, for example, contributed by Miss M.A. Hill, seemed promising until I saw that it called for, among other things, five pounds of flour, three-quarters of a pound of lard, and six nutmegs.
Fortunately, Laura Kumin in her book All Stirred Up, a history of suffrage cookbooks, provides a few translations. I chose Dr. Vesta Miller’s corn cake in honor of her excellent medical advice. In its 21st-century form, the recipe was much easier to follow. I mixed the flour and cornmeal and beat the eggs and milk, stirred it all together, poured it into a hot skillet, and deposited it in my beautiful temperature-controlled oven so it could bake up crisp and golden.
While I did all this, I was alone in the kitchen. There were no distractions, not even my phone because I needed both hands. There was nothing to do but think. I thought about The Woman Suffrage Cookbook. I thought about Dr. Miller and Frances Willard (for whom a dorm at my college was named; the residents used to throw a rager of a keg party every year on her birthday). I thought about Rebecca May Johnson’s essay “The Weaving Room,” which begins “Cooking is thinking!” Johnson writes that so-called “women’s work,” traditionally beneath the notice and understanding of men, actually gives women space and time to think and theorize: “Moments of revelation with implications far beyond the kitchen may occur through work in the kitchen.”
How much of the suffrage movement was conceived in various kitchens? How many essays and speeches were composed by women standing in front of their stoves? What kind of information or invitations were passed along under the guise of a simple exchange of cake recipes? The Woman Suffrage Cook Book concludes with five pages of “Eminent Opinions on Woman Suffrage” from the likes of Plato and Abraham Lincoln (their comments were taken out of context, but both seemed to be in favor). It’s the only part of the book that is overtly suffragist or has any contributions from men, and it is completely separate from the cooking.
But maybe that was the point. Maybe the idea that cooking is thinking was another fact of 19th-century life that went without saying, at least among women, just like how if you could stand to keep your hand in the oven for 20 seconds, it was at the perfect temperature for baking a cake. And maybe that was another motive behind The Woman Suffrage Cook Book and its successors. White men controlled a lot of things in 19th-century America, but not women’s thoughts. And as the women chopped and stirred, maybe their thoughts would drift beyond the kitchen to how they could get the vote… and all the things they would do once they got it, once reality caught up to the kitchen.
Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.
