Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911

Introduction

Introduction When California became the sixth state to grant women the right to vote in 1911, su√ragists believed it marked a turning point for the national women’s movement. For the first time women had become voters in a state with a city, San Francisco, that mirrored eastern cities in size and immigrant workingclass population. To gain the vote California women had developed innovative political techniques and cross-class alliances that attracted wide attention. National su√rage leaders, especially, hoped that the link between California su√ragists and progressivism—clearly a reform movement of growing national importance—was a harbinger of future success.∞ California was also a significant victory in its own right; as Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman’s Journal, the national organ of the su√rage movement, wrote in 1911, California was ‘‘the greatest single advance that the su√rage movement in America has yet made.’’ Women had won the vote in five other western states, but these lightly populated states commanded few electoral votes in presidential elections. Thus women voters in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Washington had little influence in national elections , an equation that su√ragists believed California would begin to change significantly. Yet, despite the importance of the California campaign, we know little about the state women’s movement that achieved such a vital victory and so profoundly changed regional and national definitions of gender, politics, and citizenship.≤ California women achieved the vote by creating a social movement; this 2 Introduction is the story of that movement from the 1880s to 1911. Movement activists— predominantly white and a∆uent—created a new kind of women’s politics. These women developed new values, established new organizations, and linked them together in a new collectivity—a new mass movement. The women called their movement ‘‘organized womanhood’’ to emphasize what they saw as the source of their power, politicalized solidarity. This movement not only gained women citizenship but transformed the politics of the white middle class and contributed to the political movement that we now call progressivism. This book documents, then, how women’s collectivity transformed women—and their world.≥ Organized women transformed themselves, their gender, and their politics, but they did so in a process that borrowed from and in some ways maintained older understandings of gender, politics, and citizenship. They gained citizenship and developed a place for women in politics, but it was not the same kind of citizenship or place in politics that men held. They became female citizens who did not possess the same power or rights as male citizens. Most noticeably , although California women won the right to vote in 1911, male lawyers and judges successfully contended that this did not grant women the right to serve on juries. To become jurors the women had to engage in yet another campaign, which they did not win until 1917. Women entered politics, but they did so as women committed to what they understood as womanly politics—those that were moral, altruistic, and civic minded. The women felt ambiguous about partisan politics—an arena they saw as male, amoral, and self-seeking. Organized women attempted to link terms they saw as opposites —such as the good woman and politics—but they found that they could do so only by qualifying their terms. The woman citizen who engaged in politics in 1911 represented a transformation that both challenged and maintained traditional notions of gender.∂ Because this is a study of how women in a social movement transformed political definitions, it looks closely at the various kinds of politics that helped create, shape, and maintain organized womanhood. It examines how women created organizations to enlarge women’s public opportunities, how those organizations coalesced into a movement, and how women in that movement developed a dynamic sense of themselves as something greater than their many parts—a sense of themselves as an organized womanhood.∑ The name women gave themselves, organized womanhood, explains what they saw as the source of their power—their numerous groups were so systematically united that they could speak as one and thus for all women. They reached this conclusion because they struggled to build a movement com- Introduction 3 posed of many di√erent women and because they assumed that women like themselves—white, native-born a∆uent Protestants—represented the true essential woman of ‘‘womanhood.’’ Organized women understood womanhood as meaning that...