Becoming Citizens: California Women's Suffrage Movement Review
This paper reviews Gayle Gullett's Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911, which chronicles how California's women's suffrage campaign evolved through three distinct ideological phases. Beginning with radical, nationally inspired activism led by figures such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the movement shifted toward reformist progressivism aligned with William Jennings Bryan's populist platform, and finally achieved its goal through the conservative "Good Government Movement." The review examines Gullett's argument that suffrage was ultimately won not through female solidarity or single-issue advocacy but through ideologically moderate, male-inclusive coalition politics — a success the author finds instructive yet unsettling.
- Overview of Gullett's Argument: Suffrage won through moderation and male inclusion
- The First Stage: Radical Roots and National Influence: Anthony-era radicalism drives early California movement
- The Second Stage: Reform Progressivism and Moral Politics: Bryan's populism reshapes suffrage toward moral reform
- The Third Stage: The Good Government Movement: Conservative coalition achieves 1911 suffrage ballot amendment
- Tensions and Contradictions in the Suffrage Victory: Class bias and nativism undercut movement's feminist aims
- Concluding Reflections on Strategy and Legacy: Radical vs. pragmatic strategy debated; legacy assessed
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What makes this paper effective
- The review closely follows the book's own three-stage chronological structure, giving readers a clear map of Gullett's argument before offering critical assessment.
- It raises genuinely analytical questions at the end — about strategy, radicalism, and the cost of coalition politics — rather than simply summarizing the book's content.
- The reviewer identifies the central tension in Gullett's thesis: that the movement's ultimate success came precisely by diluting its feminist identity, which the reviewer flags as "unsettling."
Key academic technique demonstrated
This review demonstrates evaluative synthesis: the writer reconstructs the book's three-phase argument in their own words while tracking a single interpretive thread — how ideological transformation, not ideological purity, produced suffrage success. The closing paragraph's use of rhetorical questions effectively signals critical engagement without overstating the reviewer's own thesis.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a framing argument about the nature of the suffrage movement, then walks through Gullett's three historical stages in order. A penultimate paragraph introduces complications and critiques (class bias, nativist sentiment, male co-optation), and the conclusion poses open evaluative questions about whether the strategic choices were justified. The structure mirrors the book's own arc while maintaining an analytical distance from it.
Overview of Gullett's Argument
Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911 by Gayle Gullett. 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, given its prominent place in contemporary history. However, Gayle Gullett's book Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911 is instructive in the way it highlights how the campaign for female suffrage was forced to undergo a series of ideological and structural transformations in order to achieve a specific goal. Rather than manifesting itself as a pure politics of group solidarity among women across class lines, this movement achieved success only when it took on the form of ideologically oriented rather than group-oriented politics, and incorporated men and moderation into its fold.
The First Stage: Radical Roots and National Influence
This was not true of the beginnings of the women's rights movement in California. At the very outset, the Californian movement took its lead from its first most notable figure — not a Californian, but the national feminist advocate Susan B. Anthony. This period, Gullett suggests, highlighted a specific aspect of the early women's rights movement: a kind of radicalism, as opposed to the later forms of reform progressivism, albeit with a uniquely Californian emphasis (102).
Gullett breaks the history of the women's movement into a series of stages. The first stage began in 1880 and ended with the 1896 defeat to gain suffrage within the state. This first stage was a radical movement — 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 may be considered most characteristic of the period.
The Second Stage: Reform Progressivism and Moral Politics
The second wave of the women's movement for suffrage in California was far more reformist in its ideological nature. This phase focused not so much on the personal rights of women or issues of wedlock, but on how the introduction of women's voices into politics could bring a more "moral, humane, harmonious" character to political life (107). Early radicalism was replaced with an emphasis on reform and broader alliances with men, alongside community-service-oriented efforts led by women.
This second period is characterized not so much by a leading female figure as by the political candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was defeated in the election, but his populist reform progressivism — which encompassed suffrage within its ideological program rather than treating it as the sole issue — crystallizes the period's stress on reformism as opposed to single-issue women's rights advocacy.
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