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About Me

I am a social historian who explores the everyday experiences of ordinary people, primarily women. I focus on women’s working and political lives, asking how identities such as race, nationality, class, and age have shaped them. I am 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. I am 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.  I am currently engaged in two book projects. Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (forthcoming 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 Hau 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. My next book project, Indians on the Road: Gender, Race, and Regional Identity reimagines the West Coast through the lens of Indigenous people’s relationships with the transportation systems that bisected their lands, forming corridors of conquest and environmental change while simultaneously connecting them in new and sometimes empowering ways to other people and places. I am also co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Indian  Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism (along with with Kent Blansett and Andrew Needham).

Recent Publications

BOOKS:

Recasting the Vote: How Women  of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press, October 2020)

Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Book Details

ARTICLES & CHAPTERS:

“‘Our Democracy and the American Indian’: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and Native Feminists in the 1920s,” Special Forum on 1920 Ed. Liette Gidlow, Journal of Women’s History (Forthcoming)

“A Matter of History: Carrie W. Clifford Claiming Freedom Through History” in Women Claiming Freedom: Slavery, Race, and Resistance Across the Americas Ed. Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder (Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming Fall 2020)

“Urban Indians, Native Networks, & the Creation of Modern Regional Identity in the American Southwest,” in“Representing Native Peoples,” Special Issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal Ed. Liza Black and Nicholas Rosenthal (2018) Vol. 42, No. 3.

“‘An Old and Faithful Employee’: Obligation, Social Provision, and Federal Retirement Pensions in the U.S. Indian Service” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 14 No. 4 (Fall 2015), 531-540.

“Making and Marketing Baskets: The WNIA and Indigenous Basketmakers in California” in The Women’s National Indian Association Ed. Valerie Shear Mathes  (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) https://www.amazon.com/Womens-National-Indian-Association-History/dp/0826355633

“Nobel women not a few”: The Women’s National Indian Association and the Lake Mohonk Conferences” in The Women’s National Indian Association Ed. Valerie Shear Mathes (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) https://www.amazon.com/Womens-National-Indian-Association-History/dp/0826355633

“Moving in Multiple Worlds: Native Indian Service Employees” in Beyond Two Worlds Ed. Jim Buss and Joseph Genetin-Pilawa (forthcoming, SUNY Press) http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5925-beyond-two-worlds.aspx

“Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin: Indigenizing the Federal Indian Service” in “The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies” special combined issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures and American Indian Quarterly Ed. Chadwick Allen and Beth H. Piatote (Summer 2013) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/amerindiquar.37.issue-3

“‘An Indian Teacher Among Indians’: Native Women as Federal Employees” in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism Ed. Carol Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2012). http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/89xmc4rr9780252037153.html

“Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife: Families in the Federal Indian Service” in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the American West Ed David Adams and Crista DeLuzio (University of California Press, 2012) http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520272392

“‘You think it strange that I can love an Indian’ Native Men, White Women, and Marriage in the Indian Service” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (Fall 2008)

Co-Editor of Intermarriage in American Indian History: Explorations in Power and Intimacy in North America, a special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Fall 2008)

Media Coverage

Social Media

@CathleenDCahill

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Family, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Race, Women