Hispanic Women and the Fight for the 19th Amendment in New Mexico (U.S. National Park Service)

Cathleen D. Cahill is an associate professor of history at Penn State University. She is a social historian who explores the everyday experiences of ordinary people, primarily women. She focuses on women’s working and political lives, asking how identities such as race, nationality, class, and age have shaped them. She is also interested in the connections generated by women’s movements for work, play, and politics, and how mapping those movements reveal women in surprising and unexpected places. She is the author of Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1932 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), which won the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award and was a finalist for the David J. Weber and Bill Clements Book Prize. Her most recent book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press, Fall 2020) follows the lead of feminist scholars of color calling for alternative “genealogies of feminism.” It is a collective biography of six suffragists–Yankton Dakota Sioux author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša); Wisconsin Oneida writer Laura Cornelius Kellogg; Turtle Mountain Chippewa and French lawyer Marie Bottineau Baldwin; African American poet and clubwoman Carrie Williams Clifford; Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, the first Chinese woman in the United States to earn her PhD ; and New Mexican Hispana politician and writer Nina Otero-Warren–both before and after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. She also serves on the advisory committee for the national Votes for Women Trail and is the steering committee chair of the Coalition for Western Women’s History.

Footnotes

[1] Census of 1910 lists Cleofas, Arabella, and Marie as residents of Las Vegas, but Cleofas was the superintendent of the state petitionary in Santa Fe. Year: 1910; Census Place: Las Vegas Ward 3, San Miguel, New Mexico; Roll: T624_917; Page: 5B; Enumeration District: 0197; FHL microfilm: 1374930. A newspaper article suggests Arabella and Anita Romero were sisters-in-law. See “Appointments by Governor,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, March 2, 1917.

[2] “150 Santa Fe Suffragists in Demonstration at Home of U.S. Senator Catron,” Santa Fe New Mexican, October 21, 1915.

[3] Ibid.

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