Women's Suffrage - 90th anniversary

This year is the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920,which declared "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."  Illinois Constitutional Law before that had stated that "neither idiots, lunatics, paupers, felons nor women shall be entitled to vote." Suffragist cookbooks and a recipe for a Pie for a Suffragist's Doubting Husband...


Wyoming was the first to formally allow women to vote in 1869 as a territory, and then as a state had the first woman governor. Esther Hobart Morris, an early promoter for women's voting rights, was appointed the first female Justice of the Peace in the US in 1870. One statue of Morris is on the front lawn of the State Capitol building and a second is one of Wyoming's two state statues in the US Capitol's Statuary Hall.

Suffragist cookbooks online:

Burr, Mrs. Hattie A. The Woman Suffrage Cook Book. Boston: c1886
Jennings, Linda Deziah. Washington Women's Cook Book. Seattle: 1909.

And from the Suffrage Cookbook by L.O. Kleber. Pittsburgh, 1915:

Pie for a Suffragist's Doubting Husband

1 qt. milk human kindness
8 reasons:
War
White Slavery
Child Labor
8,000,000 Working Women
Bad Roads
Poisonous Water
Impure Food

Mix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm, especially with the upper crust. Upper crusts must be handled with extreme care for they quickly sour if manipulated roughly.

©2010 Patricia Bixler Reber
hearthcook.com