A Recipe for Subversion: How Suffragists Used Cookbooks to Fight for the Vote

Join API’s Executive Director Lucienne Beard for a lively conversation about food and the women’s suffrage movement with Dan Macey, food stylist, food historian and president of the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley. Dan will share suffrage cookbooks and how they were used to promote women’s right to vote. He’ll also test some of the recipes offered in the books. This unique event will address how suffrage organizations in the United States and England published cookbooks, partly to raise funds and also to refute the prevailing notion “that suffragists are not domestic loving creatures.” In 1887, The New England Farmer noted that the first suffrage cookbook “is a real housekeeper’s book, and bespeaks an active interest in the kitchen by those who have sent the recipes, some of which are original.”

Suffragist and equal rights activist Alice Paul is known for hunger strikes rather than culinary exploits, but food plays a role in her personal story and that of the National Woman’s Party. Lucy will share anecdotes from Alice Paul’s life centered on food, and stories that reveal lesser known aspects of Alice’s personality.

Though this program is free, please consider donating when you register. All donations will be divided evenly between the Alice Paul Institute and the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley.