The nation’s and California’s Progressive Era coincided with an ongoing movement for women’s voting rights that had gained momentum in the 1890s. Women wanted the vote not only to be men’s civil equals, but also to raise the standards of public morality. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both sexes agreed that women constituted society’s “beacons of virtue.” Accordingly, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a group committed to realizing total abstinence from alcohol consumption in the United States, established its California chapter in 1879 to combat the scourge of male alcoholism. In the 1880s leaders in that organization had started chapters within the Pacific Basin in Hawai’i, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, and China. Throughout this maritime region, as in California, WCTU members pushed for voting rights. Lacking sufficient public support for abstinence in California, WCTU members embarked on a suffrage campaign, hoping that a female electorate eventually would help win the battle against alcohol consumption in the state through the passage of a prohibition law.
The convergence of progressivism and the women’s suffrage campaign just after the turn of the century boosted the prospects of both efforts, as the two became mutually supportive. If reform-minded women could obtain the ballot, so they reasoned, they could more effectively elevate public morality. As voters, and presumably elected and appointed officials, they would protect their communities from the vices of male alcoholism, race track gambling, and prostitution.
Led by the WCTU and other upper-middle-class mostly white women’s groups, suffragettes organized the California Woman’s Congress in 1894. The purpose of the organization was to unify women in the demand for voting rights as a prerequisite to exercising full citizenship rights. The following year the state legislature approved a constitutional amendment providing for suffrage; it could not become law, however, until ratified by male voters in the 1896 election. Meanwhile, wealthy suffragettes crossed class lines, garnering support from working and socialist women. The leaders excluded non-whites, however, particularly African Americans and Mexican Americans. These leaders, assuredly, were not immune to the prevailing white racism of the times, but equally important to them was the fact that the struggle for women’s rights was sufficiently difficult without further complicating and encumbering their efforts by simultaneously championing racial equality. Spokespersons, like the famed Susan B. Anthony who came to the Bay Area to help lead the cause, emphasized that America needed white women to bring order out of the chaos and human misery plaguing factory cities across the land. Voters, nevertheless, refused to ratify the suffrage amendment.
Members of chapters of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, headed by Clara Burdette in 1900, quickly took up the reform cause, stressing women’s role in working for civic “improvement” and downplaying suffrage. In 1903 they tasked themselves with restoring El Camino Real (the historic King’s Highway) of California’s mission period; in this way they were acting in the public sphere while evoking the state’s romantic past and stirring civic pride. Moreover, clubwomen volunteered their services in public schools, and - joined by professional men - led a rapidly growing City Beautiful movement by planting trees and building parks and playgrounds in the state’s urban centers. The success of the movement in cities such as San Francisco even inspired City Beautiful advocates across the Pacific in Australia and New Zealand to spruce up their municipalities. Soon additional women’s groups formed in the Golden State, for example the California Club in San Francisco and the Civic League of Los Angeles, to help in beautifying cities and enhancing social services. The leadership and membership in both organizations included only the white social elite.
To demonstrate their non-radical, mainstream thinking, clubwomen showcased their patriotism and support for American empire-building in Pacific waters. For example, in 1903 Katherine Hittell, a California Club officer, told the San Francisco Merchants’ Association that world power was shifting to the Pacific Basin and that the City of St. Francis would become the commercial hub of the new American overseas empire. Accordingly, municipal bonds should be approved to give San Francisco the infrastructure and look of an imperial maritime trade center. Show the “world that we have confidence in the destiny of our queen city [of the Pacific Coast],” she urged.
Clubwomen backed their speeches with actions that demonstrated their qualifications for full citizenship rights, including voting. In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, they formed a Women’s Sanitation Committee. The committee volunteered its services to wage a “war on rats” as part of a government effort to battle the city’s postearthquake outbreak of bubonic plague. When some of the city’s businesspersons tried to end the graft prosecutions, the 2,000-member women’s auxiliary of the male Citizens’ League of Justice called for a boycott of those merchants urging an end to the trials.
At the 1908 state Republican convention suffragettes paraded into the gathering and demanded endorsement of women’s right to vote. They based their case on women’s entitlement to full citizenship rights. When the male attendees politely rejected the demand of the “ladies” and thanked them for attending, the suffragettes booed and hissed. “We don’t want your thanks - we want justice,” they replied. Led by William F. Herrin, the Southern Pacific machine controlled the convention and would not budge on any significant reforms.
With backing from the Lincoln-Roosevelt Leaguers, the herculean efforts of Caroline Maria Severance, Katherine Philips Edson, and others brought results. By a small margin of 2 percent, and despite Hiram Johnson’s noncommittal stance on the issue, California’s male voters ratified a women’s suffrage amendment in 1911.
Armed with the vote, female progressives carried forward their crusade against liquor consumption. Local prohibition laws closed bars in about half of the state by 1913. Statewide
Figure 9.2 Cartoon, "The Suffragette,” San Francisco Cal, August 29, 1908. The Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, representing California women, is drawn in shackles that render her powerless in the face of male party bosses like William F. Herrin who do not want to be bothered by women seeking the ballot. Courtesy of California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside, <Http://cdnc. ucr. edu>.
Prohibition came to California only when the federal government oversaw the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution in 1919 and Congress passed the Volstead Act later that year to implement the amendment.
Race track gambling and prostitution, often connected to saloons, greatly concerned California progressives. A 1911 law forbade betting on horse races. Slot machines were disallowed by another measure. Female reformers, in particular, fought prostitution because they felt it degraded members of their sex. In 1913 the state legislature passed a Red Light Abatement Act, which criminalized pimping and allowed police to padlock brothels. Despite these steps, the targeted social vices persisted, especially in San Francisco and other large cities.
World History
