Women Suffrage Cookbook: Virginia Cookery Book Published by Virginia League of Women Voters, 1921

Virginia League of Women Voters

First Edition

Virginia League of Women Voters. Virginia Cookery Book: Traditional Recipes, 1921, uses community cookery to fund women’s civic education in Virginia immediately after national woman suffrage became law. The book belongs to the suffrage and women’s citizenship culture of the early 1920s, joining domestic knowledge, local advertising, and political fundraising in support of newly enfranchised women’s public participation.

Virginia League of Women Voters. Virginia Cookery Book: Traditional Recipes. Richmond, VA: Virginia League of Women Voters, 1921. First edition. 192 pages, cream illustrated boards, 9.25 x 6.5 inches. The foreword states that the League offers the book “in the hope that those who use it will find it helpful,” and that purchasers will have “contributed to the fund of the League for education in good citizenship.” Recipes are attributed to community members, and local advertisements place the volume within Richmond civic and domestic networks. A pencil ownership inscription on the front pastedown is dated August 8, 1929.

Virginia women gained the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment became federal law in August 1920, despite Virginia’s refusal to ratify it at the time; women in the state then voted in the November 1920 elections. The Virginia League of Women Voters emerged from that post-suffrage transition, as suffrage activists redirected organizational work toward political education and civic participation. Covers worn, three-quarters of spine lacking, binding still tight, text and illustrations crisp and clean with minor foxing to some blank areas and edge wear; overall good to very good condition. A politically resonant women’s community cookbook linking household labor, suffrage networks, and the practical funding of citizenship education in post-Nineteenth Amendment Virginia.

Item #20832

Price: $450.00