All Stirred Up

Suffrage Cookbooks, Food, and the Battle for Women's Right to Vote

Laura Kumin

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781643134536
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Les femmes dans l'histoire

In honor of the centenary of the 19th amendment, a delectable new book that reveals a new side to the history of the suf frage movement. We all likely conjure up a similar image of the women's suffrage movement: picket signs, red carnations, militant marches through the streets. But was it only these rallies that gained women the exposure and power that led them to the vote? Ever courageous and creative, suffragists also carried their radical message into America's homes wrapped in food wisdom, through cookbooks, which ingenuously packaged political strategy into already existent social communities. These cookbooks gave suffragists a chance to reach out to women on their own terms, in nonthreatening and accessible ways. Cooking together, feeding people, and using social situations to put people at ease were pioneering grassroots tactics that leveraged the domestic knowledge these women already had, feeding spoonfuls of suffrage to communities through unexpected and unassuming channels. Kumin, the author of The Hamilton Cookbook, expands this forgotten history, she shows us that, in spite of massive opposition, these women brilliantly wove charm and wit into their message. Filled with actual historic recipes ("mix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm, especially with the upper crust") that evoke the spirited flavor of feminism and food movements, All Stirred Up re-activates the taste of an era and carries us back through time. Kumin shows that these suffragettes were far from the militant, stern caricatures their detractors made them out to be. Long before they had the vote, women enfranchised themselves through the subversive and savvy power of the palate.

PART ONE THE SUFFRAGE BATTLE

Old fireplace, oven, and cooking utensils at the Mission House, Stockbridge, Mass.

ONE TIME TRAVEL: IMAGINING THE PRE-SUFFRAGE WORLD

“American history between 1815 and 1848 certainly had its dark side: poverty, demagogy, disregard of legal restraints, the perpetuation and expansion of slavery, the dispossession of the Native Americans, and the waging of aggressive war against Mexico. But among its hopeful aspects, none was more encouraging than the gathering of the women at the prosperous canal town of Seneca Falls.”

—Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848.

Starting the Journey

The battle for women’s right to vote—suffrage—began in a much different world from the one we inhabit. Let us travel back to 1848, the year of the Seneca Falls Convention, generally considered the beginning of the organized campaign for suffrage.

In 1848, Harriet Hanson is twenty-three years old. She has been working in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills since she was ten years old. Her father died when she was six and Harriet’s widowed mother has been struggling ever since to keep her four children fed and clothed. Soon after Harriet’s father died, her eldest brother chopped kindling to sell to neighbors and her mother and all four children slept in the same bed to keep warm. When one neighbor offered to adopt Harriet to lessen the burden, her mother replied, “No; while I have one meal of victuals a day, I will not part with my children.” In 1835, when Harriet was ten, the family moved from Boston to Lowell, and her mother worked taking in boarders from the local textile mill. Harriet became a “bobbin doffer” at the mill for $2 a week (less than $60 today), replacing empty bobbins of thread on the looms with full ones. A year later, the mill owner instituted a pay cut. To protest, then eleven-year-old Harriet led the other girls working with her out on strike. The strike failed and in retaliation for Harriet’s participation, her mother lost her job. But Harriet, who went on to become an author and suffragist, later wrote that as she led the striking millworkers, she “was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved, and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.” Sadly, Harriet Hanson did not live to see that day—she died in 1911, nine years before women gained the vote.¹

In 1848, America is a far different place from the country we know today for many more people than Harriet Hanson, her fellow workers, and her family. We are back in an era when slavery existed, even in some parts of the country that would remain in the Union during the Civil War,² men could legally beat their wives, and women lost the few rights they had when they married.

Instead of thinking that the campaign for women’s suffrage was destined for victory, imagine a world in which women did not have the right to vote in any country, fighting for the vote was not an obvious choice as a women’s rights issue, and winning the vote was far from guaranteed.

It took seventy-two years to go from a resolution in favor of voting rights at that 1848 convention, written by one woman and passed by a roomful of people, to a constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by thirty-six states in 1920, a process that involved hundreds of legislators representing millions of people. Understanding suffrage through this decades-long battle requires starting at the beginning.

What was America like for people, especially women, as the journey began?

The Nation in 1848

Thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, just seventy-two years before the Seneca Falls Convention. It has been barely over sixty years since the United States Constitution was signed in 1787, and as of 1848, there are only twelve amendments to the Constitution. Besides the Bill of Rights (which consists of the first ten amendments), there are only two additional amendments, ratified in 1795 and 1804.

As of 1848, the country has grown from thirteen initial states to thirty, and slavery is legal in half of them. Although most slaves are in the states that will secede during the Civil War, there are slaves in Northern as well as Southern states. Many Northern states passed laws abolishing slavery decades before the Civil War, but those laws did not automatically free already enslaved people in those states. For example, although Pennsylvania passed a law gradually abolishing slavery in 1780 and New Jersey passed a similar law in 1804, slavery was legal in those states by the terms of their laws until the mid-1840s.³

Living and Dying in 1848 America

The population of the country in the mid-1840s is between 17 and 23 million. The largest city, New York, has just over 300,000 people. The next largest cities are Baltimore and New Orleans, with just over 100,000 inhabitants each.

Compare that population snapshot to the current one. By 2010, the United States population will grow by over 1,200 percent to 310 million people. In the intervening 160-plus years, New York City’s population will balloon to over eight million and both Baltimore and New Orleans will drop far from the top ten US cities by population. San Jose, California, which has barely 1,000 inhabitants in the late 1840s, will grow to over one million people and be the tenth-largest city in the United States in the first decade of the 21st century.⁴

Of course, there are no social media platforms or even telephones in 1848; there are also no airplanes, cars, lightbulbs, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, home refrigerators, gas or electric stoves, or mixers. The first use of anesthesia in surgery happened just two years earlier (1846) and insulin has not yet been discovered. There is no aspirin, pasteurization for milk, syringes, or vaccines for diseases such as tuberculosis, whooping cough, tetanus, or rabies.⁵

Diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever, malaria, and dysentery kill hundreds and even thousands during the middle of the 19th century. Urban areas are especially bad places to live in terms of contracting diseases. Even smaller cities are not spared. Cholera epidemics, which began in 1832, will soon kill 5–10 percent of the populations of Midwestern cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Detroit. New Orleans has such a high death rate that it is dubbed the “death capital.”⁶ Those who work in factories are in particular jeopardy where there are few safeguards from poor conditions because regulation of working conditions is almost nonexistent. In one recent year (1844), 362 laborers from the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile factories died; some of these laborers worked at the same factory as Harriet Hanson. Of those 362, 200 were children under ten years old. Many more mill workers became ill from lung diseases, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, lung inflammation, and croup, as well as cholera infantum (an often fatal form of gastroenteritis occurring in young children), scarlet fever, measles, dysentery, and inflammation of the brain. Noise from the textile machinery deafened workers and accidents were common.⁷

While mortality statistics only provide a broad picture, the scene they paint for 1848 is grim indeed. The average life expectancy for a white person is less than forty years, and for an African American it is only twenty-three years. (Compare that to life expectancy in 2000; for both whites and African Americans it will increase to over seventy years.) Infant mortality is high, too. Of 1,000 births per year, over 215 white babies will die in 1848, as will approximately 340 African American babies. By 2000, the infant mortality rate in the United States will drop to under 16 per 1,000 births in both groups.⁸

There is no census or mortality data for Native Americans during the 1840s,⁹ but we know that it was a devastating time for Native Americans everywhere, including the territories that had yet to become part of the United States. White settlers and their governments forcibly pushed Native Americans westward, causing suffering and death during the mass relocation. During one notable relocation in the 1830s, the Trail of Tears, a number of Native American tribes were forced to relocate from the Southeast to the Western territories.

Big Changes Afoot

The United States is on the threshold of big changes in 1848. The California Gold Rush has just started, and the westward expansion is in full swing. The influx of miners and adventurers will advance the formation of a country that will eventually reach from “sea to shining sea,” but it will also result in the deaths of about 100,000 Native Americans in two years, a staggering tragedy some call the “California Genocide.”¹⁰ The Mexican-American War has just ended and under President James Polk the country has annexed the Republic of Texas, the Oregon Territory, and much of what would later become California and the Southwestern states. The term “Manifest Destiny” was coined in 1845, meaning the belief that expansion of white settlers throughout North America was both imperative and inevitable. One year later, Mormon leader Brigham Young led several thousand followers in about 500 wagons on a journey of more than a thousand miles, from Illinois to the area near the Great Salt Lake.¹¹ This starts a mass emigration of Mormons to the area that will become the state of Utah. In the next two decades or so, until the transcontinental railroad is built, about 70,000 Mormons use horses and wagons to follow this route, known as the Mormon Trail, to Utah.¹²

Other mass movements of people are also in store for the United States. The Irish potato famine, political upheaval in Europe, and hard economic times lead to large numbers of immigrants from Europe, mostly from Ireland and Germany. By 1850, the number of foreign-born Americans will rise to almost 10 percent of the population (excluding slaves) and it will spike to almost 15 percent by 1890.¹³ The large numbers of immigrants will lead to anti-immigrant violence and the rise of the American Party (dubbed the Know Nothing Party), founded on intolerance. At its height, the Know Nothing Party w...