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

8. THE CIVITAS OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL CULTURE: The Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley, 1904–1929

175 8. THE CIVITAS OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL CULTURE The Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley, 1904–1929 sandra l. henderson The Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley (tcc) offers a microhistory that uncovers several important lessons regarding women’s political culture in earlytwentieth-centuryCalifornia,illustratingthecomplexitiesofwomen’s political activism as it emerged through urban voluntary associations. The history of Berkeley’s tcc reveals that California enfranchisement did not politicize organized women; they had been fighting for the vote since the 1880s, and by 1911 they had already crafted sophisticated political identities as more than just suffragists. Likewise, organized women’s activism did not cease after the vote was won, contrary to traditional accounts of women’s political quiescence after suffrage and activist dormancy until second-wave feminism in the 1960s. The declared lacuna in women’s activism after suffrage was won exposes how the significance of women’s political culture was obscured by narrow definitions of politics, and conventional measurements that took masculine political practices as the normative standard. Women’s activism in such voluntary organizations as the tcc changed the very definition of what counted as politics during the progressive era and the interwar years. Women enlarged not only their own citizenship but the entire realm of political engagement. The tcc’s activism demonstrates the fluidity of politics and our need for expanded definitions of political culture and the functions of community during the early twentieth century. As Paula Baker first observed, historians need to define politics more broadly “to include any action, formal or informal, taken to affect the course or behavior of government or the community.”1 The activism of the women of the Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley during the opening decades of the 1900s fits well within this definition of politics, and the culture that they developed invites closer examination. As citizens without ballots, California women before 1911 actively debated what governments should do, and how women could effect sandra l. henderson 176 social change. They invented ways to apply pressure to politicians and policymakers, shape public opinion, and leverage reforms. California women thus transformed what constituted local politics, as well as statelevel politics (particularly through their federated women’s club networks), and they inaugurated this new political world with an innovative, gendered playbook. tcc women epitomize the progressive-era creation of a political culture grounded in a civitas. The Latin term denotes a range of relational meanings—citizenship, a union of citizens, the inhabitants of a city, townsfolk. In U.S. political practice, it encompasses qualities that the women of the tcc exemplified: “(1) The body of citizens who constitute a state, especially a city-state, commonwealth, or the like; (2) Citizenship, especially as imparting shared responsibility, a common purpose, and sense of community.”2 tcc women founded their club at the ground level of their city-state, and it molded their sense of citizenship, their public identities, their consciousness shifts, their urban activism, and their political culture generally. Furthermore, their embodied civitas took a trajectory from urban to international politics, sometimes even sidestepping nationalism to engage directly in globalism. tcc women offer a prime example of the contradictions within progressivism , which could be simultaneously liberal and conservative in its impulses. They were liberal on such issues as labor protection and reforming the juvenile justice and mental health systems, yet conservative regarding others—film censorship, alcohol prohibition, and racial segregation. These tendencies continued well beyond the progressive era. The tcc also demonstrates activist women’s resistance to partisanship in California prior to the New Deal realignment. Although they played a critical role in shaping state politics in the early twentieth century, and generally supported progressive Republican candidates as the best reformers , California clubwomen did not view party allegiance as the means to reform. Newly enfranchised women resisted being taken for granted by any party, and at the national level the fight for suffrage employed a strategy of opposition to incumbent parties until the vote was won. The tcc influenced women’s political culture and California’s legislative agenda years before equal suffrage, through organized legislative lobbying, civic forums, voter education, candidate support or opposition, the civitas of women’s political culture 177 petitioning, letter-writing campaigns, and publicity. These well-honed tools subsequently enhanced their voting power. Organized women thus accrued significant political power prior to California’s equal suffrage amendment in 1911, and continued their wide-ranging activities beyond World War I. The...