Gayle Gullet

Gayle Gullett Gullett, Gayle. Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911. Women in American History Series. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. The women's rights movement is often characterized as a national movement because of its present day context in contemporary history and time.

However, Gayle Gullett's book Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 is instructive in the way that it highlights how the campaign for female suffrage was forced to undergo a series of ideological and structural transformations to achieve a specific goal. Rather than manifesting itself as a pure politics of group solidarity amongst women across class lines, this movement only achieved success, ultimately, when it took on the form of ideologically oriented rather than group-oriented politics, and included men and moderation into its fold.

This was not true of the beginnings of the women's rights movement in California, true -- at the very beginning, the Californian movement took its lead from its first most notable figure, not a Californian, but the template of Susan B. Anthony, national feminist advocate. This period, the historian Gayle Gullett suggests, highlighted a specific aspect of the past of the women's rights movement, namely a kind of radical as opposed to the later forms of reform progressivism, albeit with a uniquely Californian emphasis. (102).

Thus, Gayle Gullett breaks the history of the women's movement into a series of stages. The first stage of the women's movement development began in 1880 and ended in 1896's defeat to gain suffrage within the state. The first stage was a radical movement, and both more diffuse and more nationalist in tone, taking its lead from national, non-Californian activists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the former of whom might be said to be characteristic of the period.

The second wave of the women's movement for suffrage in California, however, was far more reformist in its ideological nature. This moment in time of the California women's movement focused not on not so much the personal rights of the female sex and issues of wedlock, but how the introduction of women's voice into politics could bring a more "moral, humane, harmonious" aspect to political life. (107). Early radicalism was replaced with an effort on reform and more alliances with men and community-service-based efforts of a female stripe.

This second period could be primarily characterized not so much by a leading female figure, but by the political candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was defeated in the election, but his populist reform progressivism that encompassed suffrage into its ideological fold, rather than emphasized this single issue to the exclusion of all others, crystallizes the period's stress upon reformism, as opposed to women's rights or suffrage in a single-issue oriented focus.

The third, most 'conservative' (if it may be called so) period of the pro-suffrage women's movement in California began in 1906. This was when affluent women and men of California began to join together politically in the "Good Government Movement." This movement, although it achieved the agenda of the original, radical movement, was perhaps the least 'female-oriented' in terms of its ideology, than any of the movements that had existed before.

Yet, even though it was not constructed or specifically focused upon achieving a political agenda, the "Good Government Movement" alone finally allowed for a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage on the ballot in 1911. This was accomplished, activists assured the legislature and Californians part of a general movement for good government, rather than a victory for women alone. (181). This is rather "unsettling," in the author's terms, in terms of what it says about the achievement of women's suffrage as laudable as the outcome might have been.

(7) The "Good Government" movement, moreover, may have achieved some other strong achievements in its ideological progress through the state, but because of its beginnings in the upper class, it had a strong and occasionally unpleasant missionary aspect to its attempts to address social ills. There was also a strong anti-migrant sentiment in some aspects of its membership. Gullett's specific highlighting of Californian Women's Club involvement these later campaigns took a backseat to male reformers' desire to purge cities of machine politics and corruption,.