Cathleen D. Cahill

Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement by Cathleen D Cahill does so much more than tell the reader how these women of color worked to secure the vote for all women. This also highlights the very important need for those not being included in the writing of history to write their own histories and document their own struggles and successes.

I came to this book to help fill in the many gaps in my understanding of the history of the suffrage movement and was rewarded with a rich and detailed history of what should likely be called the suffrage movements as told primarily through several important women of the time. This is told with both moving narrative and startling facts. If this were all the book accomplished, I would have been pleased with it.

But Cahill shows how, when what history treats as the success of women's suffrage occurred, there were still many women left on the outside looking in. Their work was not finished and they realized their stories were not being told in either contemporaneous activism or in the writing of the history. yet again, the combination of race and gender was erasing these activists from the picture as surely as Stalin erased people from his version of history. So these women kept working toward their goals and documented every step of the way.

We now are largely aware of the interlocking systems of oppression that operate in society, yet to a large portion of white readership and even academia, this is a fairly recent acknowledgement, maybe about 1980s or 90s. But these women, and all people of color, have always known that there is not one single element of society that can be isolated and solved to make life better. They must be approached together as a whole, even if at a given moment one aspect takes center stage. Recasting the Vote shows how each woman worked for improving the lives in their communities on more than one front.

I highly recommend this to any reader who wants to better understand either the suffrage movements or how activism must both work on multiple problems while always documenting and keeping their history alive. I will definitely be rereading this and will also be looking more closely at some of the wealth of sources in the notes and bibliography sections.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)