Think you know the story of women’s suffrage? Think again. In this episode of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, Boyd sits down with co-host Cathleen D. Cahill to discuss her groundbreaking book Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (UNC Press, 2020). Cahill’s book challenges the traditional narrative of women’s suffrage by centring the Indigenous, African American, Latina, and Asian American women who organized, mobilized, and redefined the fight for political rights.

Cahill introduces us to a cast of remarkable women—Zitkála-Šá, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, Carrie Williams Clifford, and Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren—who pushed the fight for the vote beyond white, middle-class reformers. Their activism linked suffrage to sovereignty, citizenship, immigration, and racial justice, recasting the movement as part of a much bigger struggle for equality.

Along the way, we explore why the story doesn’t end in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment—and why it still matters for today’s fights over voting rights.

Further Reading:

Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (1997)

Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020)

Michelle Duster, Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells (2021)

Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (2020)

Jad Adams, Women and the Vote: A World History (2014)

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Today Cathleen interviews Elizabeth Garner Masarik, about her book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Created the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), which is the 2025 winner of SHGAPE's H. Wayne Morgan Book Prize. For more information about the Society's three book awards (deadlines in October) see https://www.shgape.org/prizes-awards/

Books mentioned by Dr. Masarik in today's interview:

• Katherine G. Aiken, Harnessing the Power of Motherhood: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1883-1925 (University of Tennessee Press, 1998)
• Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
• Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (Yale UP, 1993)
• Rickie Solinger, Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 1992)
• Molly Ladd Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932 (Rutgers University Press, 1986)
• Jane Tomkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Oxford UP, 1985)

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.