The long campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States included a surprising tactic: sweets. Suffragists organized bake sales and compiled fundraising cookbooks, selling recipes for treats like kiss cakes and ginger cookies. Baking and sharing recipes both raised money and reinforced social bonds among women, turning domestic work into political strategy.
Many of those 19th- and early-20th-century recipes are difficult to follow today. Newspapers such as The Woman’s Exponent in Salt Lake City listed ingredients by the pound rather than by cup and often omitted specific baking times and temperatures. Juli McLoone, curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan, points out that home cooks of the 1880s used cast-iron stoves fueled by wood or coal, so directions commonly advised bakers to use “a quick oven” instead of giving an exact degree setting.
Modern attempts to recreate period recipes—like an 1885 kiss cake—suggest these confections were simpler and less sweet than many contemporary decorated cookies, yet still enjoyable. Bake sales across Salt Lake City and the wider West sold cookies, cakes, pies and small confections, and the proceeds helped suffragists travel and campaign nationally.
Cookbooks produced by suffrage groups served a dual purpose: they raised funds and promoted the movement’s image. By publishing reliable recipes and household tips, activists presented themselves as competent homemakers whose domestic skill signaled efficiency and responsibility—qualities that supporters argued translated well into civic life. While some suffragists wanted to move women entirely beyond traditional domestic roles, the majority used household expertise as part of their claim for greater public participation.
An example is The Suffrage Cook Book, published in 1915 by the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania. It included dependable ginger-cookie–style recipes, endorsements from governors of states that had already granted women the vote (mostly in the West), and even a humorous recipe aimed at persuading husbands to back women’s suffrage.
Facing caricatures that painted activists as unfeminine or neglectful of family duties, suffragists used modest confections, bake sales and cookbooks to reshape public perception. These domestic projects helped portray campaigners as skilled homemakers and committed citizens working toward broader rights, turning everyday kitchen labor into a practical and symbolic tool for social change.