The cookies that fueled votes for women

Elizabeth Gillis / NPR

The long fight for voting rights for women in America had some delicious twists. Suffragists often raised money for their activities with bake sales and by compiling cookbooks to sell . While it might seem counterintuitive for women to bake cookies and share recipes while trying to be taken seriously outside of the home, it was actually an effective way to strengthen ties among women and advance their cause.

We wanted to get a sense of what the suffrage bake sales looked and tasted like, but found that the recipes were hard to recreate. In the recipes printed in the Woman's Exponent , a suffragist newspaper in Salt Lake City, the flour and butter were measured by the pound, not the cup. The recipes call for ingredients that are hard to come by today. Th