Playing with the Big Boys

Gayle Gullett. Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xiii + 262 pp. Photos, notes, and index. $42.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Kathleen Kennedy. Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xx + 147 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95.

The issue of citizenship has been a main concern of women's historians who seek to understand its meanings in women's political history. What exactly does "citizenship" mean to women at any given historical moment? Does it mean something different for men than for women? Who defines citizenship? How can women obtain this right if men control the gatekeeping . . . and, most importantly, what rules must women follow once the basic right is obtained in order to expand its definition so that they become men's equal in political matters? The two books under review, Gayle Gullett's Becoming Citizens and Kathleen Kennedy's Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens, concentrate on the relationship between women and citizenship in the period immediately preceding the achieving of the vote for women in California and the United States as a whole. Gullett presents a generally positive account of California women's club members' steady campaign to win suffrage while Kennedy illustrates the repression of a select group of anti-World War I activists. Taken together, the studies indicate that assertive women activists who generally played by the rules established by the male power structure and learned how to manipulate or circumvent those rules, could, however slowly, gain some semblance of political equality while those who defied those rules were punished.

For Gayle Gullett, women activists in California between 1880 and 1911, when the state granted women the vote, worked in various collaborative ways to achieve their goal of citizenship, i.e., the understanding that they were capable of supporting themselves and could "thus think and vote independently" (p. 5). Whereas the majority of the organizers were white and affluent, their self-proclaimed "organized womanhood" movement eventually crossed gender, class, and racial lines to reach its goal (p. 2). In the process, women learned how to gain favor with those male politicians whose influence, they believed, would make their dream of political equality come true.

Gullett identifies four stages of women's activism leading to citizenship. The first step on the way to California suffrage was the building of a multi-pronged women's movement which accepted the traditional belief that women were chiefly concerned with the issues of "home and morality" while at the same time reflecting their own "insight--that they could organize and gain strength from each other" (p. 13). Cooperating with each other, they believed, "organized womanhood" could lead to the power of citizenship. Hence, between 1880 and 1893, organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest and most influential California women's group; the Los Angeles Woman's Club; the Ladies Benevolent Society; the Women's Cooperative Union; the Friday Morning Club, and the Women's Parliament of Southern California identified and worked on issues and projects to improve women's lives. With some overlapping memberships and the inspired leadership of such women as Laura de Force Gordon and Caroline Severance, their efforts eventually led to a consciousness that a female voice in government was necessary in order to correct economic, political, and social injustices forced upon women.

In Northern California, women's efforts initially concentrated on the Associated Charities of San Francisco and the Public School Reform Association, two organizations embracing the Progressive-Era idea of addressing urban problems and political corruption in city government through organized reform efforts. Although not initially interested in suffrage, campaigning for school board reform, in particular, led San Francisco women to create the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), a group which sought to cross class and religious lines through self-help projects meant to increase...