Women’s suffrage in California was a decades-long fight. Suffragettes spoke, wrote and petitioned for the right to vote long before the subject first appeared on a statewide ballot in 1896.
African American activist Naomi Bowman Anderson was a leading voice in the early fight for women’s suffrage in California, speaking to churches across the Bay Area of the importance of Black women obtaining the right to vote. Ida Harper and Clara Shortridge Foltz were also notable suffragettes. The 1896 Amendment was voted down 55.4% to 44.6%.
In Mendocino in April 1890, a student debate on the subject took place at the public school. A committee was appointed to judge the debate, consisting of notable names L.A. Morgan, J.D. Murray and Byron Clark.
The debate teams were split by gender, with six young girls arguing for suffrage, and three boys arguing against. Each student prepared an essay to read, and notably, the judges awarded the pro-suffrage team the debate winner by a score of three to one.
Just six years after this debate, the 1896 amendment failed statewide. In Mendocino County, the results were 1,519 for and 1,927 against. Residents remained divided on the topic when it made it onto the 1911 ballot.
State Senator John B. Sanford from Ukiah was an outspoken anti-suffragist, speaking to the state legislature in 1905. “When the day women suffrage arrives,” he said, “we will find women wearing bloomers and running government while men will be washing dishes and learning cradle songs. The bedside prayer of one pure noble Christian woman far outweighs the work of any mannish female politician on earth.”
Women’s suffrage passed on the 1911 ballot. In Mendocino County, the measure failed by a very slim margin, 1,285 against to 1,273 for. In the Big River Precinct near Mendocino, the vote was 63 for and 97 against. Despite these results, the measure passed statewide by a narrow margin of 3,587 votes, or 50.73%, making California the sixth state that granted women the vote.
Nannie Flood Escola was the first woman in Mendocino to cast her vote in the 1912 presidential election. She arrived at the polls just after 6am on November 5 on her way to teach in Little River. It is not known who she voted for, and she notably did not declare a political affiliation in existing voter registration records. While California’s electoral votes went to Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson overwhelmingly won the election with 435 electoral votes.
Averee McNear is the curator at the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino, Calif.
This story originally appeared in The Mendocino Voice.