You go, ladies ... proper to the voting sales space.
100 ten years in the past, California ladies joined their already-enfranchised sisters in 5 different Western states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Washington — and solid their first ballots.
It took one other 9 years for all American ladies to get the vote; the nineteenth Modification made it unlawful for states or the nation to cease ladies from voting.
It was a close to factor, although, even in California.
Within the Oct. 10, 1911, election, with solely males voting, after all, Proposition 4 — sponsored by a Pasadena Republican state senator — handed by the skinniest of margins: 3,587 votes, which added as much as about one vote per precinct throughout the state.
Our buddies in San Francisco County — brawling, broad-minded San Francisco — voted an unequivocal “no” — simply 38.1% in favor. Together with rural voters, it was Los Angeles County voters who helped Proposition 4 to succeed in the winners’ circle, with a countywide “sure” margin of about 5,200 votes.
Ellen Dubois is a professor of historical past and gender research at UCLA and the writer of “Suffrage: Girls’s Lengthy Battle for the Vote.” And she or he says suffragist campaigners weren’t simply the white, middle-class lot that you just may need thought. For one, Dubois factors out, there’s Maria Guadalupe Evangelina de Lopez, a Los Angeles native and future teacher at Dubois’ personal college. She gave pro-suffrage speeches round Southern California. She had suffrage leaflets translated into Spanish and had 50,000 of them handed out by election day. At an immense rally on the L.A. plaza earlier than election day, she delivered her speech in Spanish — a novel and compelling factor to do then.
5 months earlier than the crucial 1911 vote, Lopez threw what The Instances described as a “sensible tea social gathering … at her residence within the shades of the previous San Gabriel Mission” for the School Equal Suffrage League.
In keeping with the guide “Incomes Energy: Girls and Work in Los Angeles, 1880-1930,” she went to France in World Conflict I, drove an ambulance, realized to fly and was honored by the French authorities. She died in 1977 at age 96.
Naomi Bowman Anderson, a Black lady who moved to San Francisco within the Nineties, took up the suffrage campaign however died in 1899 earlier than it got here to cross. One other formidable Bay Space Black lady, Lydia Flood Jackson, campaigned for civil rights and ladies’s suffrage and mentioned feelingly that “suffrage stands out as one of many element elements of democracy; suffrage is among the strongest levers by which we hope to raise our ladies to the very best planes of life.” She died at 101, a yr earlier than the nation’s landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act grew to become regulation.
L.A.’s formidable suffrage motion nonetheless needed to maneuver round restrictions on public conferences that L.A. — a famously anti-union metropolis — had crafted to thwart labor organizing. So, as Dubois tells it, they put collectively a “picnic” the place they handed out “votes for ladies” doughnuts. (I do not know what the crullers truly appeared like, however I hope they have been frosted within the suffragette colours of purple, white and inexperienced.)
Katherine Edson was a pillar of the suffrage motion right here; on the time, activist ladies of means and social standing have been known as by the genteel title “clubwomen,” however a whole lot of them, like Edson, kicked posterior. In later years she sought and received a minimal wage and higher working circumstances for ladies. However in October 1911, Dubois famous, she exhorted Los Angeles suffragists to not “lull your self into the idea that the vote has been gained;” that they need to “start early and work late” on election day. Scores of vehicles — this was Los Angeles, in any case — rolled out onto the streets on election day to take voters to the polls.
The pushback to ladies voting was fairly muscular. In California, the Liquor Sellers League labored particularly arduous to maintain ladies and their moralizing sentiments away from the polls; the temperance motion already had a superb head of steam, crusading in opposition to the ruination that drunkenness was bringing to households, when a person typically drank up most of his weekly pay at taverns tempting him between his office and his residence.
Tobacco and playing pursuits additionally went weak on the knees pondering of girls’s energy on the polls to intervene with carousing and corruption.
However a few of the opposition took on the guise of defending the little woman from herself.
A month earlier than the decisive October 1911 election, a outstanding member of the native Males’s League Against Extension of Suffrage to Girls argued that “We aren't preventing ladies. We're preventing for ladies, preventing lest the efforts of an overenthusiastic minority ought to reach imposing ineffective burdens upon the ladies of our state.” The speaker was a outstanding San Marino man, George S. Patton, father of the World Conflict II basic. Referring to a well-liked operetta of the time, suffragists known as the league “the Chocolate Soldier brigade.” A “chocolate soldier” was a strutting man with an overweening perception in his personal fabulous significance.
The Instances, I'm sorry to say, was venomously against ladies’s suffrage. Venomous was just about the default tone for something the paper’s writer, Gen. Harrison Grey Otis, didn’t occur to love. However this venom was flavored with snark, one thing between “don’t fear your fairly little head about it” and “there’s in all probability nothing in your fairly little head anyway.” To The Instances, Proposition 4 was a “pet proviso.” The trigger despatched “charming younger ladies” to foyer males with their coquetry.
As a substitute, it supplied this: “The Instances honors the ladies of Los Angeles greater than those that try to lure them from the mellow radiance of the house into the fierce glare of publicity. It might remorse to see our maidens performing as members of caucuses and our wives leaving the babe to attend within the cradle whereas they crowded to the polling sales space.”
Yeah, about that “mellow radiance”: Postcards served as a sort of social media community of the day, and the cartoonish marketing campaign through postcard in opposition to suffrage each right here and in Nice Britain unwittingly made the case for ladies.
In imagining a job reversal — ladies slightly than males going out to work and vote, after which coming residence to calm down and browse the paper, and males staying residence all day and night time with the children — they confirmed that males truly did certainly have it good in comparison with ladies, whose lives have been typically round the clock drudgery at residence.
The postcards additionally depicted ladies as so frivolous that they’d vote for the handsomest candidate, so corruptible that they’d give and take bribes for votes.
The one which delivered a gut-punch for me is a card (on the high of this column) exhibiting twentieth century suffragists standing earlier than an 18th century George Washington and demanding the vote, and the shocked Father of His Nation asking, “Did I save my nation for this!” (Memo to George: Hell, sure.)
After ladies did get the vote, The Instances — like lobbyists and politicians — turned out to be … limber. A yr or so later, the paper unabashedly requested ladies to vote for its candidate for mayor, and when that man gained, it congratulated ladies on being “properly ready for the poll, they usually proved yesterday how they perceive its energy.”
Gee, thanks, Normal O.
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