Cathleen D. Cahill. Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement.

Abstract

The recent centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment occasioned both public celebrations and scholarly interventions. Many historians welcomed the chance to engage a wider public audience interested in questions of gender, race, and citizenship in the midst of a highly contested election that made women’s voting timely and relevant. Of more lasting significance will be the new scholarship produced about the women’s suffrage movement. Cathleen Cahill’s Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, an exploration of the contributions of women of color to that movement, takes its place as one of the most significant additions to that literature. In many ways, the history of women’s suffrage has gotten a bad rap: dismissed as a narrow story written and controlled by white women, it too often exists in its own silo, seemingly disengaged from broader US history. Cahill’s book, like the best recent suffrage historiography, conclusively shows that women’s suffrage did not exist in isolation but was always in dialogue with larger societal questions. This is US history, not women’s or suffrage history. Cahill’s book can be read as a manifesto for why suffrage matters.