On the Road to Ratification

The fight for women’s suffrage, both in California and the United States, was a long and challenging endeavor spanning nearly a century. Debated since the birth of the United States, equal suffrage succeeded temporarily, when New Jersey’s 1776 Constitution (pictured) granted suffrage rights to women and African Americans, rights rescinded in 1807. The struggle gained significant traction in the mid-1800s, furthered by the efforts of abolitionist allies including Harriet Tubman, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. In July 1848, Mott and Stanton launched a nationwide movement for women’s rights at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. There, Stanton read her Declaration of Sentiments and accompanying resolutions to the nearly 300 attendees, calling for women’s full citizenship and equality, but without directly addressing racial inequality and oppression.

In 1866, Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Douglass, and abolitionists Lucy Stone and Martha Coffin Wright co-founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which aimed to secure “equal rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex.” But alliances proved fragile, especially amid debates around the 15th Amendment, which granted the vote to African American men but not to women. In 1869, the AERA split into two parallel organizations: The National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Stanton and Anthony, focused increasingly on gaining rights for white women, while the American Women’s Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone and others, advocated for action at the state level for women’s and for African Americans’ civil rights.

Over the ensuing decades, the struggle for women’s rights took on many forms. Women including Laura de Force Gordon lectured about women’s suffrage and founded suffrage societies, and many established organizations, such as the California State Woman Suffrage Educational Association (1873, pictured); the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU, 1874); and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW, 1896; pictured, top center, is its first president, Mary Church Terrell). Progress was slow; in 1869, Wyoming Territory became the first to grant women suffrage, and in 1870, the first in which a woman voted in a general election.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA joined forces to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which, under the leadership of Stanton and Anthony (pictured, bottom center) focused on gaining suffrage rights for middle-class, educated white women, even as the assault on the rights of African American men and women intensified under Jim Crow. African American women fought for social justice on many fronts, reflecting the multiple forms of oppression they faced. Ida B. Wells, for one (pictured, right), published widely against lynching; sued a train car company for wrongfully removing her from a train; and spoke out against the treatment of African Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Many women—including Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black woman to publish a newspaper in North America; Anthony, who was arrested and tried for voting illegally 1872; Sojourner Truth; and scores of others—attempted to vote, hoping to use any resulting court battles to gain voting rights. California suffragist Ellen R. Van Valkenburg was one of the first women in the state to try to register to vote. She sued Santa Cruz County Clerk Albert Brown for excluding her from county voting rolls, arguing that voting was within her 14th Amendment citizenship rights. She took her case all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled that the 14th Amendment did not guarantee women’s right to vote. Pictured are the cover page of Van Valkenburg’s Appellant’s Brief to the Supreme Court (1871, left) and a page from the Supreme Court Opinion (1872, right).

In 1872, AWSA unsuccessfully petitioned California’s Legislature to pass a law for women’s suffrage. During California’s second Constitutional Convention in 1878 and 1879, suffrage advocates circulated petitions around the state (pictured right) and championed amendments for changing the state’s original Constitution, which restricted voting rights to “white male citizen[s]” even though it granted women property rights. Proposed amendment No. 39 struck the words “white male” from the Constitution (pictured left). But these hopes for modifying the constitution at the 1879 Constitutional Convention were dismissed as various opponents within the all-male delegate body expressed their fears of women participating in politics and defeated the amendment. The language in this section was eventually changed to read, “native male citizen” instead.

Efforts to give women the right to vote in California continued into the 1890s as Assembly Bill 136 and Assembly Bill 246 (pictured) made their way through the Legislature. Neither bill passed. Despite these setbacks, the suffrage movement in California achieved incremental success. In 1894, California’s Republican Party endorsed women’s suffrage. In 1895, suffrage advocates organized a statewide campaign to pass Assembly Constitutional Amendment 11 (pictured), which would grant women suffrage rights in California. Among the measure’s supporters, African American lecturer and women’s rights advocate Naomi Anderson (featured in the article pictured) spoke at rallies and churches all over California to diverse audiences. In the November 1896 election, this measure failed at the ballot box, with slightly over 55% voting against it. Many feared that women would vote against the sale of alcohol.

Though the 1896 Amendment failed, women’s suffrage supporters in California began to organize more broadly, boldly, and visibly. They built alliances with women’s clubs, advocates for working class women (including Josephine Casey and Maud Younger, pictured), rural voters, and women of color to increase public acceptance of voting rights. From the end of the 19th century into the first two decades of the 20th, women produced publications, such as the Yellow Ribbon, a statewide newsletter devoted to suffrage issues (pictured, 1906), and women’s clubs and suffrage organizations such as the California Equal Suffrage Association (pictured, founded in 1904), the Political Equality League (founded in 1909), and the Votes for Women Club organized rallies and events.

In 1910, women’s suffrage activists found an ally willing to put the question of voting rights on the ballot in the next election. In early 1911, Republican State Senator Charles W. Bell sponsored Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 8 (Proposition 4), which would grant women the right to vote in California state elections for the first time. He argued that women had the intelligence, perseverance, and honesty to “uplift the state.” Supporters had only eight months to organize their campaign to win voter approval for this proposal. To publicize their cause as widely as possible, suffragists produced pin-back buttons, pennants and posters, postcards, playing cards, and shopping bags. They used electric signs, 8-foot tall billboards, and lantern slides at night to flash their message. They distributed over three million pieces of literature and over 90,000 “Votes for Women” buttons in Southern California alone.

Progressive Southern California Assembly Member H. G. Cattell wrote the ballot argument in favor of the proposition (pictured, left), arguing among other things that women were equal to men intellectually and superior to them morally, that they should not be subject to taxation without representation, and that, contrary to fears expressed by anti-suffrage forces, places that already had women’s suffrage had experienced benefits through women’s votes.

Some suffragists sought to build coalitions and reach out to various communities, including women who spoke Spanish. These two pro-suffrage flyers were created by the Political Equality League in 1911. The flyer on the left, ¡Dad a la mujer de California el derecho de votar!, was part of a campaign to persuade Spanish speaking Californians to support Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 8. Maria Lopez, President of the College Equal Suffrage League and a Los Angeles high school teacher, translated many flyers into Spanish in the Los Angeles region.

California newspapers provide a glimpse of the meetings and rallies that suffragists organized to drum up support for the 1911 vote. At left, an article in the Los Angeles Herald shows labor activist and suffragist Maud Younger as instrumental in gaining young working-class women’s support for women’s suffrage. At right, an article in the San Francisco Call describes a rally in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento attended by San Francisco suffragists, while the article at top right from the Madera Mercury describes Maria Lopez’s efforts to rally support in Los Angeles. The article at bottom left notes the organizing and speaking activities of Myra Virginia Simmons, a Bay Area suffragist, head of the Colored American Equal Suffrage League, and chair of the Women’s Civic and Progressive League in Oakland. Also pictured is a flyer seeking volunteers to work the polls on election day.

The campaign in support of women’s suffrage faced stiff opposition from liquor and other business interests. One powerful detractor was State Senator and Democratic Caucus Chair J. B. Sanford, who argued that voting was a privilege rather than a right and that, because politics was “no place for a woman,” this “privilege should not be granted to her.” Former Los Angeles District Attorney George S. Patton argued that if women were unable to take on the same responsibilities as men to defend laws “with force and arms”, they could not argue for equal rights to vote. Many women were also opposed. The woman-led Northern California Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage argued that most women opposed women’s voting rights because political equality would deprive women of their special status as moral influencers, among other reasons.

The work of women’s suffrage and equal rights advocates paid off when California’s women’s suffrage amendment passed on October 10, 1911. On the night of the vote, early indications were that the measure had failed, especially as “no” votes streamed in from the San Francisco Bay Area, where many voters – especially liquor producers and sellers – feared that women would eventually vote against the sale of alcohol. Just over 246,000 total votes were cast, and Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 8 passed by 3,587 votes. Pictured here is the Statement of the Vote for this election, with the page (at right) showing the breakdown, by county, of the vote for Amendment 8.

Following the passage of California’s suffrage amendment, the fight for women’s voting rights continued nationwide. Posters, cartoons, postcards, and other materials were passed out at rallies, published in magazines, sent to friends, and displayed in public spaces. Those featured here include Hy Mayer’s The Awakening (pictured top left, 1915) showing a woman striding from Western states where voting rights were a reality to the Eastern ones where women were clamoring for it. The Votes for Women/Ohio Next! postcard (bottom right, after 1911) echoes the point. Kenneth Russell Chamberlain’s Revised (1917, to right), showed the expansion of a woman’s sphere beyond the home into any place where she could “make good”; and the “Votes for Women” postcard depicts a girl asserting her right to have a voice, given all that she provides to society. The graphic at bottom left, Savagery to “Civilization” by Puck’s political cartoonist and activist for Indian rights Udo (Joseph) Keppler, noted that Iroquois women, looked down on by the dominant culture, had long since attained the equality that white suffragists were struggling to gain.

California women were powerful voices in the fight for national women’s suffrage. Charlotta Bass, pictured at left, wrote many pro-suffrage editorials in her influential newspaper, the California Eagle, the largest African American newspaper in the state. In a 1916 article published in the Los Angeles Herald, Ella Wheeler Wilcox reflects on the many benefits that women’s votes had “mothered” for the people of California, including minimum wage laws and pensions, prison reforms, and the 8-hour workday (Women as Voters: Records Show Reforms are Instituted in Equal Suffrage States, April 10, 1916. Rallies and other forms of activism continued as well, with plenty of contact and cooperation between national and state groups; pictured here is a notice for a mass meeting organized by the NWP featuring 24 women who had been imprisoned in Washington, D. C. during the Silent Sentinels protests.

In 1918, Californians elected women to the California Assembly for the first time: Anna Saylor (pictured, lower right), who established psychiatric clinics in state hospitals and fought to abolish the death penalty for minors; Grace Dorris, Elizabeth Hughes, and Esto Broughton.

Using much of the language originally introduced in a suffrage bill in 1878 by U. S. Senator Aaron Sargent of California, the proposed 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It was ratified by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 21, 1919 and the U.S. Senate on June 4, 1919 in a special congressional session. California became the 18th state to ratify the 19th Amendment when Senate Joint Resolution No. 3 passed on November 1, 1919. Pictured is the original bill file showing the bill’s progress through the Federal Relations Committee in January 1919. As each state ratified the amendment, Alice Paul sewed a star on a banner (pictured). When word came that Tennessee’s yes vote had made women’s suffrage legal in the United States, Paul – after sewing on the final star – unfurled the banner from the balcony of the Woman’s Party’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

When the 19th Amendment became law many women claimed victory, even as they acknowledged that struggles would continue. The NAWSA became the League of Women Voters, while the NWP divided over its future. Paul continued to fight for equality by introducing the Equal Rights Act (ERA) to Congress in 1923; while 35 of the needed 38 states had ratified it by 1978, as of today this Amendment still has not passed.

Though the 19th Amendment marked the end of close to a century of the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage, voting rights were still not guaranteed to all American citizens. Native Americans were not allowed to vote until gaining citizenship rights under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Puerto Rican women were not granted full access to the ballot until 1935, when the Puerto Rican Legislature removed literacy requirements. It was only with the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that all Asian Americans gained the right to citizenship and the vote. African Americans, especially in Southern states, faced barriers to voting including literacy tests and denial of entry to polling places and it was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed that their voting rights were protected. Additional measures have been taken more recently to protect voting rights against gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other forms of infringement.

Since 1911, 129 women have been elected to the California Legislature, with the majority assuming office over the past 30 years. Despite trailblazers including Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, March Fong Eu, Hilda Solis, and Sheila Kuehl, the effort to increase female representation—both in numbers and in ethnic diversity— is a journey that will continue to exist both at the state and national level. As of 2019, women occupy only approximately 31% of the seats in the California State Legislature, though this figure is higher than on the national level. Though California has sent more women to the U.S. Congress than any other state, only approximately 25% of Congressional seats are held by women. These statistics illustrate the progress that has been made over the past century, but also indicate that the struggle for reaching equality in representation continues.