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.