California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression

14. HISTORIANS, POLITICS, AND CALIFORNIA WOMEN

339 14. HISTORIANS, POLITICS, AND CALIFORNIA WOMEN mary ann irwin Recent studies of women’s politics in California from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century make clear that voting was only one form of political activity in which women engaged, and a fairly narrow one at that. If we take a broad view of what counts as “politics,” we can see California women behaving politically long before 1911, when they actually gained the ballot. Like Paula Baker, we define politics as “any action, formal or informal, taken to affect the course or behavior of government or the community.”1 With this broad definition in mind, this essay surveys recent scholarship on women’s politics in California in the years between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression. If we begin at the beginning, with indigenous women and those of Spanish/Mexican descent, the value of a roomy conception of politics is immediately apparent. Although they constituted the majority of the state’s female population at the time of conquest, women of color were excluded from public decision-making. Indeed, from 1850 to 1929 and well beyond, formal politics in California was mostly a white affair.2 Linda Heidenreich (chapter 1 in this volume) illuminates the difficulties historians face when they attempt to reveal California Native women as political actors. Because they left few written records of their own, historians are often left to find Indian women in the narratives of others. Unfortunately, Spanish and European observers—missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and the like—placed little value on indigenous women. As a result, these narratives typically reveal little about Native women’s lives, much less their political activities. As Virginia Bouvier explains, “If female experience was not valued enough to be documented, reconstructing that history becomes problematic.”3 Like Heidenreich, Bouvier sees political action in Native women’s efforts to resist colonization. In the Spanish era, Native women engaged in the politics of resistance when they ran away from missions and presidios, when they retained their traditional roles as healers and religious leaders, mary ann irwin 340 and when they refused to alter their sexual practices, attend church, wear clothes, or speak Spanish.4 Albert Hurtado describes how the influx of white, Anglo-European gold-seekers further limited the agency of Native women.5 Maria Raquel Casas provides a fascinating case in point in her sketch of Victoria Reid, a Gabrieleño woman whose birth, marriages, and multiple widowhoods moved her back and forth across Native, Spanish, and Anglo-European identities.6 And yet, despite the overwhelming nature of the American conquest, Indian women found ways to protect their lives and cultures. GregSarrisstudiesresistanceamongthePomoofnorth-centralCalifornia.7 In the winter of 1871–1872, the revivalist Bole Maru (Dream Dance) cult spread through Pomo and Miwok territory. Pomo dreamers like Annie Jarvis, head dreamer for the Kashaya Pomo from 1912 to 1943, stressed the Bole Maru doctrines of Indian nationalism and isolationism. Jarvis outlawed intermarriage with non-Indians, forbade gambling and drinking , and halted attempts by government officials to take Indian children to boarding schools.8 As was true for indigenous women, the American influx to California was often disastrous for Latinas.9 Spanish and Mexican women had begun immigrating to California as early as the Anza expedition of 1773. Doyce B. Nunis Jr., Susanna Bryant Dakin, and others have demonstrated that Latina immigrants such as Maria Feliciana Arballo could exercise considerable independence. Antonia Castañeda suggests that Arballo’s numerous gestures of defiance—from arguing with Anza to singing bawdy songs in public—were essentially political acts.10 Scholarship on Latina politics in this era is limited in terms of the electoral process, but a growing body of scholarship on Latinas’ civil rights and labor activism is available for the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond.11 Antonia Castañeda’s “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California” provides the essential starting point for understanding Latina politics in California.12 Newer studies explore the ways that women of Spanish, Mexican, and mestizo ancestry struggled to survive, maintain their independence, and protect their cultural identities following the discovery of gold.13 Anne E. Goldman gives thoughtful consideration to Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and to Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, which Goldman describes historians, politics, and california women 341 as “two significant exceptions to the willful amnesia” that naturalized the American...