The year 1890 is a critical moment in the traditional historiography of the suffrage movement. That year, the two suffrage factions that had split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments joined to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Catherine D. Cahill begins the first chapter of her book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, during this pivotal year, not to rehash well-trod histories of the NAWSA but to provide a fresh perspective of the suffrage movement. Cahill argues that if we look at the year 1890 from South Dakota and the West, we see how questions about Native suffrage and Native citizenship intersected and drove discussions about white women’s voting rights. During that year, South Dakota’s white, male voters were faced with two referendums: one supporting women’s suffrage and one supporting Native American suffrage. Less than a month after the vote, U.S. cavalry troops claimed the lives of three-hundred Lakota men, women, and children in the Wounded Knee massacre. That same year, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known as Zitkala-sa, visited her mother on the Yankton Sioux Reservation after being separated for seven years while at a boarding school. Although seemingly unrelated in mainstream suffrage historiography, Cahill shows how these events were connected. Issues of Native sovereignty and violence against Native peoples were very much linked to women’s suffrage in the minds of white American suffragists. Future NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw, for instance, delivered a speech at the 1891 annual NAWSA conference that explicitly tied the suffrage campaign in South Dakota, the massacre at Wounded Knee, Native political rights, and white women’s political rights together in a way her audience most definitely understood. This is one example of the many eye-opening historical connections Cahill unearths throughout her monograph.
Recasting the Vote is a collective biography of six women of color who were active in suffrage campaigns, and that, together, offer a glimpse of the expansive suffrage history that had yet to be fully explored. These women include Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, who was Turtle Mountain Chippewa and French, and who spent her life fighting for tribal sovereignty; Lara Cornelius Kellog, a Wisconsin Oneida writer who also advocated for tribal sovereignty; Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), a Yankton Dakota Sioux intellectual whose suffrage activity has long been understudied; Carrie Williams Clifford, a poet and African American political activist who founded the Ohio Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and was an active member of the NAACP and the WCTU; Adelena “Nina” Luna Otero-Warren, a New Mexico Hispana suffragist and politician who worked closely with Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party; and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese suffragist in New York’s Chinatown who advocated for women’s rights in the United States and in China. These women of color came to the suffrage movement strategically to address larger issues within their respective racial and ethnic communities and were in no way a monolithic group. Cahill examines how the intersection of race, sovereignty, nationality, and gender created obstacles for the aforementioned women and their respective communities; obstacles that most white suffragists simply did not experience.
Recasting the Vote is not a collection of six stand-alone biographies. Cahill expertly weaves these individual lives into a larger, more expansive suffrage history. For example, like her reframing of 1890, Cahill reexamines the famous New York City suffrage parade of 1912 and highlights how Chinese and Chinese American women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee were integral in framing mainstream suffrage conversations. The importance of the Chinese Revolution has been absent in much suffrage historiography, yet it became a flashpoint in the suffrage movement when rumors that revolutionary China had enfranchised women reached the United States. White American suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, among others, were interested in hearing from Chinese women in the United States and white suffrage groups invited Chinese women to speak and work with them in suffrage events across the country. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was even invited to lead the 1912 New York suffrage parade on horseback alongside women from Chinatown. They carried a banner that read “Light from China.” In response, Anna Howard Shaw brought up the rear carrying a banner that read, “Catching Up with China.” By foregrounding women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee in the context of early-twentieth-century history, Cahill shows that it is impossible to overlook how women of color were influencing the suffrage movement.
In recent years, suffrage scholarship has expanded in leaps and bounds, particularly in works created during the centennial celebration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Works by Martha Jones, Lisa Tetrault, Wendy Rouse, and others have regenerated suffrage history, and Cahill is part of this momentous expansion of historiography. In many ways, however, new suffrage scholarship has done as much to undermine the anniversary date as it has to highlight it, showcasing, for instance, how many women in the West could vote long before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and how a majority of women of color were still disenfranchised after its passage. By centering women of color in her study, Cahill is able to expand both the temporality of the suffrage movement—taking it well past the Nineteenth Amendment and into issues of access, citizenship, and equality—as well as its spatial parameters, moving from common East Coast-focused narratives by expanding westward and even trans-Pacifically. Meticulous research coupled with an engaging writing style makes this book required reading for anyone—whether students, professional historians, or history buff—interested in U.S. history. Recasting the Vote is more than a reconceptualization of stories we think we already know. Instead, it highlights opportunities to ask new questions, look in new directions, and continue building a more expansive and inclusive understanding of women’s suffrage.
