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

9. “WE WANT THE BALLOT FOR VERY DIFFERENT REASONS”: Clubwomen, Union Women, and the Internal Politics ofthe Suffrage Movement, 1896–1911

209 9. “WE WANT THE BALLOT FOR VERY DIFFERENT REASONS” Clubwomen, Union Women, and the Internal Politics of the Suffrage Movement, 1896–1911 susan englander In 1896, California voters defeated a proposition granting women the right to vote. While Southern California and the rural areas supported the measure, San Francisco Bay area voters decisively trounced the proposed amendment to the state constitution. Stunned by the failure, California suffrage organizations limped away from the campaign and effectively went into hibernation for five years. The California Woman Suffrage Association , the statewide coordinating structure, held no state conventions during this period. Only nine local suffrage clubs survived the debacle, most of them in San Francisco, and fewer than a hundred state activists continued to promote suffrage during this period. The state body constructed during the campaign wasted away to a mere skeleton.1 California’s slump following the 1896 election was not unique. Nationally , the suffrage movement entered a fourteen-year period dubbed “the doldrums,” during which no state enfranchised women. This fallow stretch was exacerbated by a leadership crisis in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa), which followed the 1896 defeat and Susan B. Anthony’s decline as a visible steward of the movement prior to her death in 1906. Anna Howard Shaw, nawsa president from 1906 to 1915, lacked the dynamism and sense of direction needed to reinvigorate the organization. In the midst of an era of reform and political action, nawsa seemed, in comparison, becalmed.2 The process of revitalizing the suffrage movement began at the state and local level, as the leadership of suffrage groups restructured the clubs and devised new strategies. Concurrently, working-class women rose as a new source of membership and of tactics. In particular, female unionists verbalized an interest in woman suffrage and attempted to join forces with the reform-minded middle-class women who had been the backbone of the movement since its inception. In San Francisco, union women sought susan englander 210 an alliance with reform suffragists of the San Francisco Equal Suffrage League in 1907 to advance the suffrage cause. An examination of their tense, fugue-like relationship reveals a series of ideological differences that hindered their ability to work in the same organization and eventually dictated the need for a separate organization for the union women. These differences originated with the nature of the leadership of the 1896 California woman suffrage campaign and carried through the first years of the twentieth-century movement in the Golden State.3 Daniel W. Rodes noted in his history of California woman suffrage that temperance adherents comprised most of the leadership of the 1896 campaign.4 Suffragist Mary McHenry Keith also reported that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu) proved to be “a powerful ally” in the 1896 effort and was largely responsible for the “well-organized army of workers” that campaigned for woman suffrage that year. The liquor interests played a large role in the amendment’s defeat.5 Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of nawsa and Susan B. Anthony’s immediate successor, visited California in 1901 in an attempt to raise the morale of her troops there. The effort succeeded. State leaders recommitted themselves to the cause and began the process of rebuilding the organization. The nawsa also dispatched the organizer Gail Laughlin to California to give its western sisters a hand.6 By 1905 the California Woman Suffrage Association boasted fifty-two new clubs in addition to the revival of twenty clubs from the 1896 effort. The federation also renamed itself the California Equal Suffrage Association (cesa) in an attempt to appeal to sympathetic men.7 The bulk of leaders after 1900 were drawn from the membership of California’s women’s club movement. Many of these clubs were a direct outgrowth of the 1896 campaign and mainly involved themselves in civic improvement and humane services. While temperance continued to be a concern for some of these women, it lost its predominance and became one of a number of reform interests. A prime example of this type of activism was the California Club of San Francisco. Formed in 1898 by members of the Forty-First District Suffrage Club, the club hoped to promote the notion of women as responsible and vital citizens through participation in San Francisco’s public affairs.8 During the first year of its existence, the California Club organized one “we want the ballot for...