Cathleen Cahill's timely book RECASTING THE VOTE paints a detailed and well-researched portrait of a group of women of color who fought for suggrage in the early part of the twentieth century. It is a fantastic corrective to the story so many of us learned in school of the lily-white foremothers who fought for the vote Cahill's accounts of the work of women including Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Mabel Ping-Hau Lee, Nina Otera-Warren, Carrie Williams Clifford and Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin talks about how race and gender intertwined both in discrimination and in activism.

Thank you NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review. I found this to be very interesting and well written, it told the reader about parts of the sufragest movement that aren't as well known about. I would highly recommend to anyone interested in women's history in America.

This book about recasting the vote is dealing with the women of color who also worked at and just as hard as white women to get the right to vote for all women. For me growing up with a grandmother who went to college but was only allowed to study a few subjects and was given a certificate, not a diploma like her male students I always knew it was a struggle, just because she was white she still struggled because of her husband my grandfather who kept her down because of the difference of men and women from the time that they came from.
Also growing up in California and being into history I read about the struggles of Chinese, Hispanics, Native Americans, and of course African Americans I am glad that the research by this author is given all of these women and the decedents there just due. It is just a shame that with all that these strong women did that women are still fighting for equality in the workforce everywhere. I would also wish more people women especially young would read this book and see that working together gets more done than tearing each other apart, as a father of 4 daughters I don’t like when I see women bashing each other I hope that they could see what they can accomplish when they all work together. The work the author put into this was intensive and it shows and made this a very good read.

“Recasting the Vote”, by Cathleen D Cahill, is in four parts divided by time periods: 1890-1913, 1913-1917, 1917-1920 and 1920-1928 and focuses on five women of colour: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Mabel Ping-Hau Lee, Nina Otera-Warren, Carrie Williams Clifford and Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin and their contributions to the suffrage movement during this critical time. Each is a woman of colour and culture, their heritage forms who they are and their approach. It also means they experience and fight racism. Whilst this additional element should, perhaps, have been obvious to me, it was unexpected and heartbreaking. These women fought so many battles on so many fronts, sexism, racism and then enduring a world war, their journeys are inspiring.

In addition to the five leading ladies, Cathleen weaves in many more women of the time including the leading white suffragettes. It is an elegantly told history of America through the eyes of women and highlights the key movements that have led to today’s high tensions around the building of America and the place of different races in it. The five ladies represent the Native American, the Spanish American, the Chinese American, the Mexican American and the African American. Each shares how their countries originally come to be in modern day America and the impact racism had in shaping their lives.

The suffrage movement is often thought of as that, one movement forward through time, but this book highlights just how many strategies were tried including the ones that failed. The British came with their opinions, success in China contributed a different approach, the African American had some success in gaining rights and that influenced their approach and so on. Many movements from multiple cultures across a continent over decades experienced small and big wins before achieving their eventual goal. There were many disagreements and a lot of politics behind it all too. What we see as the right to vote had a lot more going on to win it! And when it was won, a new fight began to expand what it meant: to see women as men’s equals, and that’s still our fight today. It’s rather sobering to think that over a hundred years later, I could use the same lines of rhetoric as these ladies to encourage equality but it encouraging to see their perseverance did pay off, they got the vote eventually!

The back cover summaries this well, this is an “unfinished struggle”. We have made gains but we are not done yet. Fascinating, moving, insightful, this book is all that but it is also a call to fight on for women’s rights, much work remains. It’s a five out of five on the enJOYment scale and highly recommended!

this was a really interesting read, we don't really talk about the women of color that had anything to do with women's suffrage. It was a really good read and very informative.

I received an e-ARC of this book via NetGalley — a huge thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley! Recasting the Vote could be argued to be revisionist feminist history, but truly it focuses on the often ignored and marginalised voices of WOC during the Suffragettes movement. This book was charismatic, had excellent use of sources and meticulous research, and did a great job in showing a non-white feminist perspective on the first 'official' feminist movement in history. This book would be excellent for research on the topic and to gain a better world-view of intersectionality and feminism during the period.

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.