California Women and Politics

From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression

Robert W. Cherny, Mary Ann Irwin, Ann Marie Wilson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780803235038
• eBook ISBN:
  9780803236080
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1911 as progressivism moved toward its zenith, the state of California granted women the right to vote. However, women’s political involvement in California’s public life did not begin with suffrage, nor did it end there.

 

Across the state, women had been deeply involved in politics long before suffrage, and—although their tactics and objectives changed—they remained deeply involved thereafter. California Women and Politics examines the wide array of women’s public activism from the 1850s to 1929—including the temperance movement, moral reform, conservation, trade unionism, settlement work, philanthropy, wartime volunteerism, and more—and reveals unexpected contours to women’s politics in California. The contributors consider not only white middle-class women’s organizing but also the politics of working-class women and women of color, emphasizing that there was not one monolithic “women’s agenda,” but rather a multiplicity of women’s voices demanding recognition for a variety of causes.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “I Do Not Like the White Man . . .He Is a Liar and a Thief”Testimonios and the Politics of Resistance
• 2. “Going About and Doing Good”The Lady Managers of San Francisco, 1850–1880
• 3. “Woman Is Everywhere the Purifier”The Politics of Temperance, 1878–1900
• 4. “Continually Doing Good”The Philanthropy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 1862–1919
• 5. “Neutral Territory”The Politics of Settlement Work in San Francisco, 1894–1906
• 6. “Citizen Bird”California Women and Bird Protection, 1890–1920
• 7. Saving RedwoodsClubwomen and Conservation, 1900–1925
• 8. The Civitas of Women’s Political CultureThe Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley, 1904–1929
• 9. “We Want the Ballot for Very Different Reasons”Clubwomen, Union Women, and the Internal Politicsof the Suffrage Movement, 1896–1911
• 10. “Awed by the Women’s Clubs”Women Voters and Moral Reform, 1913–1914
• 11. “We Are Not Keen about the Minimum Wage”Union Women, Clubwomen, and theLegislated Minimum Wage, 1913–1931
• 12. “No Undue Familiarity”Gender, Vice, and the Campaign toRegulate Dance Halls, 1911–1921
• 13. “Hearts Brimming with Patriotism”Katherine Edson, Alice Park, and thePolitics of War and Peace, 1914–1921
• 14. Historians, Politics, and California Women
• Contributors
• Index