The long fight for women’s voting rights in the U.S. included some unexpected sweeteners. Suffragists raised funds with bake sales and by compiling cookbooks to sell, using recipes for treats such as kiss cakes and ginger cookies. Baking and sharing recipes helped strengthen ties among women and advanced the movement while highlighting their domestic roles.
Many of the old recipes are hard to follow today. In The Woman’s Exponent, a suffragist newspaper in Salt Lake City, ingredients like flour and butter were given by the pound rather than cups, and cooking times and temperatures were omitted. Juli McLoone, curator of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan, notes that 1880s cooks used cast-iron stoves heated by wood or coal, so recipes often simply directed bakers to use “a quick oven” rather than a specific temperature.
Despite those challenges, attempts to recreate recipes—such as kiss cakes from 1885—show they were less sweet and simpler than modern decorated cookies, but still appealing. Cookies, cakes, pies and small confections were sold at bake sales across Salt Lake City and the western United States; the proceeds helped suffragists travel and campaign nationwide.
Cookbooks served another purpose: they raised awareness for suffrage while affirming women’s skill and community work. McLoone explains that demonstrating household efficiency suggested women also had time for civic responsibility. While some activists sought to move women entirely out of the kitchen, most suffragists used domestic expertise as part of their argument for greater public roles.
The Suffrage Cook Book, published in 1915 by the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania, included reliable ginger cookie-style recipes, testimonials from governors of states that had already enfranchised women (mostly in the West), and even a tongue-in-cheek recipe for persuading husbands to support women’s suffrage.
Faced with caricatures of suffragists as unladylike or neglectful mothers and wives, bake sales, cookbooks and modest confections helped reshape public perception—showing activists as skilled homemakers and committed citizens working for broader rights.