Problem
The Limits of State Suffrage for California Women Candidates in the Progressive Era
Author: Linda Van Ingen
Source: Pacific Historical Review. February 2004, Vol. 73 no. 1, pp. 21-48
The author is a Professor of Women's Studies, 20th Century United States, Race and Gender, and Historical Methods in the history department at the University of Nebraska, Kearney.
Subject terms:
History
Women politicians
ABSTRACT
California women gained the right to run for the state legislature and Congress when they won the vote in 1911. Coming nine years before the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised women nationally in 1920, this era of state enfranchisement appeared ripe for women's electoral success. The ongoing national suffrage movement, the California Progressive Party, and the extensive network of California women's clubs could all have worked to advance women's candidacies. Instead, these factors created conditions that undermined women's political ambitions. Not until 1918, when passage of a national suffrage amendment seemed imminent and the power of the Progressive Party in California faded, did women find success as candidates. Their delayed victories reveal the limits of state enfranchisement for women's political power.
When women won the vote in California in 1911, they also won the right to run for elective office on the state and national levels. Granted the rights of full citizenship long before the national suffrage amendment passed in 1920, California women began to run for office at their first opportunity in 1912, when ten women ran for their party's nomination in the primary elections. Most of these candidates ran as third-party contenders on either the Socialist or Prohibition tickets. Only one ran as a major-party candidate: Mary Ella Ridle, of San Luis Obispo, who ran for the State Assembly as a Democrat.
Exceptional in her bid as a major-party candidate, Ridle nevertheless shared the experience of failure with the other women. Indeed, no California woman won office until 1918, seven years after the state enfranchised women. Clearly, women faced obstacles as candidates. As Ridle noted at the time, "there has never been a step taken in history that has not received its share of derision. It is the usual fate of innovations of any kind. However, someone has to make a start. In accepting this candidacy I feel that I am filling that want." 1 Her bold efforts, however, had little impact. As this article argues, possessing the rights of full suffrage before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment actually impeded California women's opportunities for electoral office. Women like Ridle had little chance of winning office on the state and national levels.
At first glance, this era of enfranchisement for women before 1920 appeared ripe for political success. The national suffrage movement was constantly revisiting its cause as political and social circumstances changed; it could have welcomed the advancement of women as candidates. The Progressive Party, needing women as political workers, saw itself as inclusionary and championed women. With California playing a critical role in its plans to become a permanent party, it could have supported Progressive women candidates. Clubwomen understood the process of public policymaking and the value of their leadership. They could have extended their interests to women's candidacies. Indeed, all these factors could have encouraged women's candidacies. The evidence shows they did not.
Instead, these factors worked against women running for office in the Golden State. The importance of California suffrage to the national suffrage movement, the rise of the Progressive Party in the state, and the critical role played by women's clubs in both the suffrage and Progressive movements created conditions that impeded women's success as candidates for state or national office.2 This article examines the dissuasive tactics of national suffragists, the obstacles placed by organized clubwomen-including the ideals of women's noncompetitive altruism, solidarity, and nonpartisanship-and the impact of the California Progressive Party, as the party in power, on women's electoral ambitions for higher office. While these factors overlap significantly, when considered independently they reveal the extent to which a woman's ability to run for office in California was thwarted during the years preceding national suffrage. Only when the burden of a national suffrage movement eased and the power of California Progressivism faded in 1918 did California women find some success in their bids for office. Ironically, however, state enfranchisement had by then limited women's political power by establishing a bias against women as partisan candidates, a bias that would follow women into the 1920s and beyond.3
Notes
• San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, July 31, 1912, p. 4.
• See Jackson K. Putnam, "The Progressive Legacy in California: Fifty Years of Politics, 1917-1967," in William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley, 1994), p. 248; Donna C. Schuele, 'A Robbery to the Wife': Culture, Gender and Marital Property in California Law and Politics, 1850-1890 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1999), pp. 206-215.
• While four women won State Assembly seats in 1918, only ten more would do so in the five decades that followed, from 1920 to 1970. See Linda Van Ingen, Campaigns for Equality: Women Candidates for California State Office, 1912-1970 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 2000).
Answer the following questions using short sentences:
1. Accuracy: Are references provided? Does the reference list include other scholarly sources?
2. Relevancy: Would this article be useful for a paper examining the similarities between political sentiment in states that granted women the right to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment? Would it be useful in an essay focusing on the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), an activist group based in New York that was dedicated to nationwide woman suffrage?
3. Intent: What is the point of this article? Is the author making an argument?
4. Authoritativeness: What are the author's credentials? What about the publication's?