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Using Women and the Everyday City, critically discuss the construction of gender in relation to SF modernism(s)

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Using Women and the Everyday City, critically discuss the construction of gender in relation to SF modernism(s). Write two pages following the format for papers in this class.

• r. Thomas Briefly Discusses Women and the Everyday City (5:32)

Sorry, I need to remind myself where the microphone is so I don't hold books in front of it! Also, what I am trying to draw attention to in this video, not very well, I think, is that women had to metaphorically carry that disciplinary space, that space of enclosure, from the home into the public when they were in public space. And this has much larger implications for our society as a whole, because it points to a transition from a disciplinary society—a society metaphorically grasped or understood in relation to spaces of enclosure—and a hyper-disciplinary society where these disciplinary relations are everywhere and "in" everything.

University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook C Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:37. WOMEN AND THE EVERYDAY CITY PUBLIC SPACE IN SAN FRANCISCO, 1890–1915 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Jessica Ellen Sewell Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:37. This book is published with assistance from the Margaret S. Harding Memorial Endowment, which honors the ?rst director of the University of Minnesota Press. Portions of chapters 2 and 5 were originally published in Constructing Image, Identity, and Place: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture IX, edited by Alison K. Hoagland and Kenneth A. Breisch (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); copyright 2003 by the University of Tennessee Press; reprinted with permission. Contemporary maps drawn by Austin Porter. Unless otherwise credited, photographs are from the author’s collection. Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the everyday city : public space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 / Jessica Ellen Sewell. p. cm. — (Architecture, landscape, and American culture series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-6973-8 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-6974-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Architecture and women—California—San Francisco. 2. Public spaces—Social aspects—California—San Francisco—History—19th century. 3. Public spaces—Social aspects—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 4. Women—California— San Francisco—Social conditions—19th century. 5. Women—California—San Francisco—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title. II. Title: Public space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. NA2543.W65S47 2011 711'.40820979461—dc22 2010032668 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:37. INTRODUCTION WOMEN IN PUBLIC Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY , San Francisco boasted a thoroughly mod- ern downtown, a specialized district of tall, densely packed commercial buildings. After the earthquake and ?re of 1906, Market Street, San Francisco’s spine and the center of its downtown, was quickly and substantially rebuilt with stylish buildings that made up an increasingly dedicated landscape of shopping and o?ces, displacing other prequake institutions, including museums and religious buildings. At the intersection of Market Street and Powell Street (Figure I.1), substantial stoneclad buildings created a relatively uniform street frontage along Market, lining the sidewalk with plate-glass show windows that created a landscape tailor-made for window shopping. Above this tall ?rst story, regular rows of windows hinted at the warren of cellular o?ces necessary in the heart of any modern city. This landscape was punctuated by signature early skyscrapers, including the Flood Building (at center in Figure I.1) and the Call Building, visible down Market Street. This image also suggests the lively mixture of uses and people that made up San Francisco’s downtown. Businessmen in suits and coats; middle-class women shoppers in long dresses and large hats; suited women who might have worked in o?ces; children (including some boys who might have been hawking newspapers); xi Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xii Introduction Figure I.1. View north on Powell (on the left) and east on Market Street, c. 1910, showing the men, women, and children who made up the crowds on the sidewalks of Market Street. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. and policemen, whose presence helped to maintain order—all share this intersection. Early-twentieth-century descriptions of Market Street emphasize this sort of bustling modernity and the cosmopolitan mixture of its crowds: Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Before noon Market Street is a bustle of business men. At noon the bright-eyed blooming youth of the o?ce forces debouche for luncheon and a “how d’ye do.” Then come the down-town cars to discharge shopping matrons, and forth come the butter?ies of leisure and of pleasure. Towards the half light the bees buzz out again and turn drones for the hour before dinner (the ?ve-o’clock promenade). Playtime has commenced. Actor, soubrette and ingenue, both professional and amateur, soldier and sailor, clerk and boulevardier, workingman and workingwoman, a dozen tongues, a dozen grades of color, a dozen national costumes—miner from the desert, cowboy from the range, chekako or sourdough from Alaska; upper, lower and half world; full of the joy of being, of forming one of the lively throng, exchange greetings more or less conventional, gaze in the brilliant store windows, buy—or hope to—and go to dinner, clubward, homeward, to restaurant and boarding-place.1 Writers at the turn of the nineteenth century presented Market Street as a space for all classes, ethnicities, and races—and for both sexes. This was “the thoroughfare alike of the strolling shopper and the hurrying businessman.”2 While women were one component of this heterogeneous crowd, their presence in public was still problematic in the public imagination. As late-nineteenth-century etiquette books made clear, the heterogeneity of urban space o?ered serious challenges to female respectability. To retain their propriety, women were advised to avoid interaction with strangers, a job accomplished by making themselves Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Introduction inconspicuous, dressing modestly, never walking rapidly or talking loudly, and quickly entering the more sanitized space of department stores.3 In this book I explore how women in varying class positions experienced this urban environment, negotiating the gaps between the urban landscape as it was built and as it was imagined to be, concentrating on the case of San Francisco. Focusing on women’s use of modern public spaces and how those spaces were built and managed in relation to women’s presence within them, I explore the complicated relationship between gender structures and the built environment.4 I concentrate on the everyday use of ordinary public spaces—streets, streetcars, shops, restaurants, and theaters—examining how women used them, which women used them, and how they were changed and expanded in response to women’s presence within them, while also considering the larger social and political consequences of women’s everyday occupation of these spaces. In doing so, I build on the work of a number of historians, including Christine Stansell, Mary Ryan, and Sarah Deutsch, who have explored the history of women in urban public spaces, illuminating the relationship between gendered ideology and experience and noting how women’s relationship to public spaces has been in?ected by class. Stansell explores the Bowery as a setting for working-class women’s construction of a new culture of sociability not possible within the con?nes of their tenement homes, Ryan focuses on the gendered perils attached to the street and other public spaces and how middle-class women negotiated them, and Deutsch looks at both female reformers’ and workingclass women’s struggles over the meanings and uses of public space.5 These authors have looked carefully at the built environment of public urban space as a setting for women’s experience and actions, but they do not, for the most part, use the built environment as historical evidence in its own right. In this book my focus on the built environment expands on their insights, but I move in new directions by considering the built environment as an active force in the construction of gender. By looking at space and movement through it, we get a much fuller picture of women’s everyday lives. This picture goes beyond what texts tell us about the ideal separation of spheres—a cultural ideal in which women were associated with the private space of the home and men with the public realm and the city—to understand how the public and private realms actually interacted. Similarly, a focus on space tells us a great deal about the experiences of women of di?erent social positions. It shows how and where these experiences converge and di?er and how women’s spatial experiences help to construct varied women’s relationships to the city. Even more important, looking at space and gender together reveals the ways that gender systems and the built environment are mutually constitutive. It demonstrates that changes in women’s everyday lives shape the built environment of the city, and that built environment in turn shapes women’s everyday experiences and the possible paths social transformations in gender can take. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xiii xiv Introduction Imagined, Experienced, and Built Landscapes The relationship between the built environment and social structures is complex. For example, the contradiction between the ideology of separate spheres and the reality of women in public is not a simple contradiction between the ideological and the real, but instead is a multifaceted interaction among ideology, experience, and the built environment. In order to think explicitly about the spatial dimension of each of these elements, I refer to them as the imagined, experienced, and built landscapes.6 Separating out the built landscape, how it is experienced and how it is thought about, allows us to see the contradictions among the three landscapes more clearly. It is these contradictions that become the ground for women’s everyday actions, as they negotiate the di?erences between the experiences made possible by a built landscape and the social norms for classed and gendered behavior. Imagined, experienced, and built landscapes not only provide a useful model for understanding women in space but also revise our understanding of the relationships among individual actors, ideology, and the built environment. We can better understand the nature of these three landscapes and how they interact by examining them in the speci?c case of downtown San Francisco. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Imagined Landscape The imagined landscape is the landscape as conceived of and understood by individuals within a group. While each individual may have a slightly di?erent understanding of the landscape, I focus here on the shared aspects of these imaginings, particularly on the culturally dominant imaginings, those that have the most currency and the most in?uence on shaping built space. As described in turn-of-the-century travel books, the imagined landscape of downtown San Francisco contained two distinctly gendered and classed realms: a business district peopled by “bustling businessmen” and characterized by masculine e?ciency, power, and modernity, and a shopping district frequented by “shopping matrons” and “the butter?ies of leisure and of pleasure,” a realm of feminine upper-class consumption, irrationality, and display. Both of these landscapes were served by a specialized and centralized network of public transportation converging on Market Street. Not only were these landscapes imagined as separate, specialized spaces, but also the built landscape largely re?ected the imagined ones: shops along major streets, fronted with show windows; cellular o?ces on upstairs ?oors, served by a sober but magni?cent entrance quite separate from the shops; and streetcars on specialized tracks in the center of the street. Although women worked in o?ces and men in stores, these landscapes were imagined as gender-segregated spaces, with the gender served in each space predominating: the businessman in the o?ce landscape and the female shopper in Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Introduction the stores. San Francisco guidebooks reinforced these gender assignments in a culturally co-ed language based on the ideology of separate spheres. Descriptions emphasized display, leisure, and whim for the feminized shopping landscape and production, hurry, and purposefulness for the masculine o?ce landscape; the female “strolling shopper” was contrasted to the “hurrying businessman.”7 San Francisco’s o?ce landscape was usually described in primarily architectural and numerical terms, with enumerations of such facts as the number of o?ces and ?oors in each building and dollars in annual trade. The 1917 Trips around San Francisco, for example, extolled the modernity of San Francisco’s “neat and clean” skyscrapers and listed prominent o?ce buildings, including the height in feet for each, but said nothing of the people and activity within these impressive structures.8 In contrast, accounts of San Francisco’s shopping landscape,with detailed descriptions of “kaleidoscopic changes from one show window to the next,” emphasized people and atmosphere over buildings and facts.9 The feminine shopping downtown was imagined as a space of pure consumption, driven by sensual experience and emotion, the opposite of the productive, logical space of the masculine business downtown. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Experienced Landscape The experienced landscape is the built landscape as actual people used it in daily practice. Thus, the nature of this landscape is highly dependent on the social position of the person experiencing it. For example, Market Street, as described in the quotation above, provided divergent experiences for businessmen, for whom it was a space to move through; for “shopping matrons,” for whom it was a space of consumption, leisure, and pleasure; and for the mixed, mostly working-class throng, for whom it was a space of vicarious consumption through window shopping. For middle-class shoppers, the experienced landscape of San Francisco’s shopping district did not ?t its imagined gender segregation. Women walked or took streetcars, which they shared with men, to get to the downtown shopping district. Once downtown, they walked from store to store along the sidewalks of that district, window-lined worlds of vicarious consumption that were frequented not only by women shoppers but also by men and women for whom the sidewalk was part of a landscape of o?ce work. This experience of mixture on the street is a consequence of the built landscape of downtown San Francisco. The Built Landscape The built landscape is the built environment and its spaces; in the example of Market Street, it includes the pavement, sidewalks, streetcars, buildings, and store windows as well as the interior and exterior spaces they de?ne. The built landscape Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xv Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. xvi Introduction is shaped by the imagined landscape and re?ects the beliefs, practices, and social structure of the culture that produced it. In the case of downtown San Francisco, the standard building type maximized the landlord’s pro?ts by combining shops, which required street frontage, on the ground ?oor with several stories of o?ces above. Nonetheless, the female-gendered shopping space and the male-gendered o?ce space were well segregated within these buildings, which generally had separate entrances for shops and o?ces and no communication between these two sections of the building. One of many examples of this separation is the Flood Building (Figure I.2), on the corner of Market and Powell Streets downtown. Each shop had its own entrance directly on the street, while the o?ces were accessed through a separate entrance on Market Street. This same separation between shop entrances and a single o?ce entrance, often marked by an arch, can be seen in all the buildings along Market Street in the area of greatest overlap between the downtown shopping and business landscapes (Figure I.3). Even the Emporium department store had o?ces lining its facade, with selling spaces behind the o?ces. Thus, the built landscape of the downtown re?ected the ideology of separation, at least at the level of spaces within a building. While space was strictly gender-segregated within each building, the e?ect of this building type was to encourage an active mix of sexes. The sidewalk in front of these buildings, traveled both by men en route to o?ces and by women walking from store to store, functioned simultaneously as part of the primarily male-gendered imagined landscape of white-collar work and the primarily female-gendered imagined landscape of shopping and was experienced as a mixed-gender space. When the downtown shopping district and the downtown o?ce district in 1911 are mapped (Figure I.4), we can see clearly that although they were concentrated in di?erent areas—a triangular area roughly de?ned by Powell, Sutter, and Market Streets for the shopping district and by Sacramento, Battery, and Market Streets for the o?ce district—a large area of overlap occurred, especially along Market Street. As Martyn Bowden’s work on the historical geography of San Francisco’s Central Business District shows, this mixing of shops and o?ces was also common earlier in the city’s history.10 Because downtown shops and o?ces share many of the same requirements, such as high accessibility by public transportation, a dense concentration of people and businesses, and proximity to banks, this overlapping of business and retail functions is in fact common in cities throughout the United States.11 Photographs of the streets of San Francisco’s downtown shopping district reveal a mixed crowd, with business-suited men and groups of women sharing the sidewalks (Figure I.5). Throughout the city, women and men negotiated the same public spaces of streets and public transportation, shopping districts, and places of amusement, although this sharing often con?icted with the imagined ideal gendering of these spaces. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.2. Flood Building, 1909. The ground-floor shops opened directly onto the street. The entrance to the upstairs offices is through the archway at the far right end of the facade. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.3. South side of Market Street west from Phelan Building, 1909. From the left, the Pacific Building, the Commercial Building, and the Emporium. The pre-1906 mixture of smaller buildings between the Emporium and Fifth Street is being replaced by a single building. The Emporium department store had an imposing entrance at the middle of its facade, while the more modest office entries were at either side of the facade. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Introduction Battery Street Bush Kearny Street Pine Grant Avenue Powell Street Stockton Street California Sansome Street Montgomery Street Sacramento A st Fir n ve Sutter ue tre et nd Av tS co ue en M Geary ke ar Se Post Th ird Av O‘Farrell u en e th ur Fo Ellis e Av e nu Eddy th Fif ue en Av Turk Golden Gate Si xth Av en ue McAllister Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Dry goods, clothing, ladies’ furnishing goods, and millinery businesses listed in the 1911 Crocker–Langley San Francisco Directory Brokers, money brokers, insurance agents, and attorneys listed in the 1911 Crocker–Langley San Francisco Directory Both types of businesses Figure I.4. San Francisco’s downtown shopping district and downtown office district, 1911. Union Square is designated with a white circle between Powell and Stockton Streets. The downtown shopping district centered around Union Square, Grant Avenue, and Market Street, while the office district was most concentrated along Montgomery and California Streets. Note the areas of overlap along Market, Grant, and Kearny Streets. Buildings such as the hybrid shop–o?ce buildings of San Francisco’s downtown were created to try to bridge the con?ict between the sorting of people by gender, race, and class and the practical requirements of modern commerce. In the built landscape, they are a trace of a clash between the imagined landscape of separation and the experienced landscape of mixture as well as an attempt to reconcile the imagined and the experienced. They both re?ect imagined gender separation and shape an experience of mixture. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xix Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.5. Market Street, early 1900s. Men, women, and children shared the downtown sidewalks. Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Introduction Imagined, Experienced, and Built Gendered Landscapes Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. As the example of downtown San Francisco shows, the imagined and the experienced landscapes are particularly important to understanding gendered landscapes. How a built landscape is gendered is di?cult to tell merely from looking at it. Gendered landscapes are often imagined landscapes, socially understood to be the space of one gender without necessarily being physically marked as such. This imagining can even supersede experience. For example, at the turn of the century department stores were imagined as entirely female-gendered spaces, to the extent that one department store owner referred to his store as an “Adamless Eden.”12 However, photographs of department store interiors show a number of male employees, including clerks and managers (Figure I.6). The strength of the imagination of this landscape as female makes the male workers culturally invisible. Figure I.6. Interior of the City of Paris department store, 1910s. Department stores were imagined as female, but this photograph shows a male shopper and several male clerks. Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xxi Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. xxii Introduction Gendered landscapes are also experienced landscapes. The presence or absence of women or of men can instantly gender a space. Thus, the same public hall when used for the Women’s Congress is a radically di?erent gendered landscape when used for a meeting of the Native Sons of the Golden West, although the built landscape stays largely unchanged. Similarly, the landscape of Market Street shifted gender through the course of the day. The quotation near the start of the Introduction suggests that Market Street was male before noon, female from noon to ?ve, and mixed-gender from ?ve on. In the interactions among imagined, experienced, and built landscapes, there is space for understanding not only dominant practices but also practices that resist or subvert the dominant practices. This subversion resides not within just one of these three categories but rather within all three; change often takes place in the interactions among them. Because of the close ties among the three aspects of landscape, the imaginings, experiences, and spaces that do not ?t in with hegemonic practices and conceptualizations resonate with one another. When any one of these aspects changes su?ciently that the contradictions between it and the others become severe, the others often are changed in response. As this book details, women negotiated the contradictions among imagined, built, and experienced landscapes in their everyday lives, making choices about what spaces to frequent and what to do there in reaction to imagined gendered landscapes. In addition, shopkeepers and others reacted to changes in imagined and experienced gendered landscapes, creating new business and architectural types to respond to women’s desires and changes in the imagined landscape. The interaction of imagined, experienced, and built landscapes and the ways that each shapes the others are important to understanding how landscape genderings change and how gendered landscapes participate in social change. Women in Public In this book I use the lenses of imagined, experienced, and built landscapes to focus on the contradictions between a set of ideologies that privileged gender and class separation and the modern consumerist city, whose spaces and uses promoted gender, class, and ethnic mixture. The ?ssures between these imagined and experienced genderings of public space in the city played out in the everyday use of space by men and women. I concentrate primarily on the years between 1890 and 1915, because they constitute an eventful period in the transition from gendersegregated to mixed-gender public spaces in the downtown, as well as a period in which women’s public roles expanded signi?cantly. In addition, only beginning in about 1890 did downtown shopping become dominant in American cities, Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Introduction around the same time that downtown o?ce, retail, and wholesale activities became specialized and separated.13 In 1890, at the beginning of this period, women were commonly in public, particularly in shopping landscapes, such as the “ladies’ mile” in New York and lower Kearny Street in San Francisco. At this time the contradiction between women’s presence in public and the ideology of separation was accommodated, although not entirely smoothly, by a wide range of women-only public spaces, including separate women’s lounges and restaurants in hotels and department stores and women’s windows at post o?ces and banks. In 1890, department stores of some variety were common in all American cities, women often attended matinees, and ladies’ tearooms were a feature of both department stores and better hotels. All of these spaces served middle-class and elite women, shielding them from interactions with the lower classes as well as unknown men. By 1915, women also frequented cafeterias and movie theaters that served people of all classes, both women and men, and they walked the streets alone with greater freedom. Their experience of the city was much more mixed-gender and mixed-class, as well as much more extensive in its scope, than that of women a generation older. The expansion of commercial amusements in the turn-of-the-century city and their increasingly heterosocial nature corresponded with shifts in gender ideology, accommodating women in public.14 There is, however, no unidirectional causation between women’s changing everyday habits and the creation of new feminine and gender-neutral urban institutions such as the nickelodeon and the cafeteria; instead, women’s public presence as workers and shoppers helped to shape these new spaces, and these new spaces in turn created new possibilities for women’s everyday use of public space. An important aspect of public space is that within it, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “everything that appears . . . can be seen and heard by everybody.”15 This made women’s appearance within public space problematic, as men’s gaze was felt to be both controlling and sexualized, threatening to women’s self-possession and reputation.16 For nineteenth-century middle-class women, to be seen in public carried the danger of being understood as conspicuous and therefore a “public woman,” a term that tellingly denoted a prostitute. Women in public were a source of cultural anxiety because of their discordance with the dominant linkage of women and domesticity. This was particularly the case in the late nineteenth century, but women in public are, to an extent, still a source of collective anxiety today.17 This anxiety is a symptom of the tensions between the imagined landscape of gender and class separation and people’s experiences of the built landscape, in which this separation was necessarily incomplete. Everyday experiences unearth these contradictions. Everyday life is where abstract cultural and ideological principles are enacted but also where they have to be reconciled with each other and Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xxiii xxiv Introduction with the requirements of ordinary life, often through built spaces and objects. But more important, everyday experiences can also contradict the imagined landscape. Henri Lefebvre writes of everyday life that it functions as “feedback” between “understanding and ideologies” and that it is “the battle?eld where wars are waged between the sexes, generations, communities, ideologies . . . where antagonisms are bred that break out in the ‘higher’ spheres (institutions, superstructures).”18 In short, the relationship between the practices of everyday life and the spaces in which they take place make visible the antagonisms inherent in any complex society and thus is crucial to understanding the engine of social change. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Diaries and Everyday Life in San Francisco The everyday life of the past is surprisingly di?cult to access, and the lives of the most ordinary people can sometimes be the most di?cult to study. Upper-class women tended to write extensively, often kept copies of their letters and other papers, and sometimes made them available in archives. At the turn of the century, working-class women were carefully watched, and their actions were noted by journalists, sociologists, settlement workers, and other reformers. In comparison, middle-class lives were less readily recorded. Therefore, ordinary middle-class lives can be more di?cult to access and have been less attended to by historians exploring the history of women in the city. In order to get at the everyday lives of middle-class women, I use a variety of sources, notably diaries, and especially the remarkable diary of Annie Haskell. Unlike memoirs, novels, and many other sources, diaries are not inherently narrative. Rather than telling a story that unfolds, diaries record the events of each day singly. For the conscientious diarist, every day requires an entry, no matter how dull, so daily rhythms of life are made evident in diaries as they are in no other source. Ordinary tasks are noted each day, creating a record of the repetition of quotidian activities such as shopping, ironing, and catching streetcars. Because diaries are not narrative, using them requires techniques that go beyond those we use for memoirs and other more narrative sources. To interpret diaries chronicling everyday San Francisco at the turn of the century, I not only read the diaries sequentially but also coded each entry for what it told of various everyday activities that engaged the public realm. The occasional descriptions of activities supply richness, providing a glimpse at emotions and the nature of experiences. The more typical lists of activities speak to us instead in the aggregate, for example, in what they can tell of the geography and frequency of encounters with particular public landscapes. Diaries are unique in what they can tell us about the real movement of people through the city. They tell us what places and experiences are linked within a day or a week; how women moved Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Introduction from one place to another; whether they traveled by foot, carriage, auto, or streetcar; and even sometimes the routes they took. They are only one source and are joined in this study by a number of others, including newspapers, maps, photographs, existing buildings, trade journals, and guidebooks. Existing buildings from the period add signi?cant insight into the nature of the built environment these women experienced.19 Yet diaries alone can tell us about the repetitions of everyday life. For this study, I have made use of three diaries of white, middle-class San Franciscans who wrote of their everyday experiences.20 Two of the women whose diaries are important to this work were upper-middle-class, middle-aged, white women. The ?rst of these, who detailed her social and business activities for 1905 and 1906 in her diary, is Ella Lees Leigh, the only surviving child of the former San Francisco chief of police Isaac Lees. Leigh was in her midforties at the time of her diary.21 She was married to Ernest Leigh, a real estate and insurance agent, and had no children. Leigh was a wealthy woman and wrote in her diary both of her own large house in Alamo Square, which she owned, and of an apartment building she was having constructed next door.22 She was active in society and was a founding member of the exclusive organization Daughters of California Pioneers. The other upper-middle-class diarist, Mary Eugenia Pierce, was also in her midforties when she kept her 1915–17 diary, which described regular outings to San Francisco, particularly to the theater.23 Pierce was single and lived with her parents in Berkeley, where they ran a residential hotel, Cloyne Court, described in a local paper as “the permanent home of many outstanding faculty members and retired professional men and women, and the local residence of world famous savants here on their sabbatical leaves or on lecture tours.”24 She assisted her parents in running the hotel and managed it from their deaths until it was turned into a dormitory in 1946. Pierce’s mother was a well-known singer and the one-time musical director of Berkeley’s Unitarian Church, and her sister Virginia was an opera singer. Concerts were held regularly at Cloyne Court, and all the family members attended concerts and other performances in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland several times a week. Pierce’s sister Lucy, who also never married, was an artist, and her brother, Elliott, was an industrialist. Like Ella Leigh, Mary Pierce was comfortably well o? and had the leisure to spend time shopping and going to shows without being concerned about spending money. In contrast, Annie Fader Haskell (Figure I.7) was often short of money and had little free time. Haskell, born in 1858 in Trinity Center, California, was a socialist, a su?ragist, and the wife of a utopian socialist lawyer, Burnette Haskell, whom she married in 1882 and left in 1897 (although she remained married to him until his death in 1907). She was the mother of one son, Astaroth, known as Roth, born in 1886. Haskell kept a diary from 1876 until 1942, although for this study I have Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xxv Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.7. Annie Fader Haskell, 1880s. Astaroth Haskell Scrapbook, Haskell Family Papers. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Introduction concentrated on the years from 1890 to 1915 and on the periods in her life when she resided in San Francisco.25 Haskell was thirty-two in 1890, a mother of a young child, living in a rented house in which she kept boarders. She left her husband after the failure of the socialist utopian settlement Kaweah, of which he was a founder. At that time Burnette Haskell was broke, drank heavily, and was openly carrying on an a?air with another woman, who was at times a boarder in their house. After leaving her husband, Haskell never had a home of her own, living instead in the Mission District of San Francisco with her sister Helen or later with her son, Roth, after he grew up and married. She was unable to ?nd employment in San Francisco as a teacher or librarian because of her age and marital status and thus worked on and o? as a teacher in small remote towns in far Northern California to support herself. Although she was well educated and her husband was a lawyer, Haskell was never well-to-do and at times complained because she could not a?ord to take a streetcar and had to walk instead. Annie Haskell’s diary is an unusually rich source. She wrote a page every day of her adult life, from 1876 until her death in 1942, and ?lled each page no matter how little of importance had happened that day. The extraordinary volume and detail of her entries provide an extensive picture of the activities and rhythms of everyday life, spanning the changes that occurred during her long lifetime. Haskell was also a good writer who carefully, if sardonically, described her life and experiences in detail. Her diary is also of particular interest because, although she was unusual in many ways, her economic position was relatively typical of ordinary middle-class women, and thus she provides important insight into nonelite experiences. Because most diaries that make it into archives are those of the elite or those chronicling unusual experiences, Annie Haskell’s diary of ordinary life is comparatively rare, and its length and detail make it extraordinary. These women had di?erent access to ?nancial, social, and cultural resources, but they all ?t broadly within the category of the middle class and were all nativeborn white women.26 Neither Ella Leigh nor Mary Pierce had discernible concerns about money; also, both enjoyed signi?cant access to resources other than strictly monetary ones. Leigh had considerable social capital as a founding member of the Daughters of California Pioneers, and Pierce had social and cultural capital through her connections to the worlds of music and academia.27 Leigh’s and Pierce’s access to ?nancial resources put them in the upper middle class. In contrast, Annie Haskell, although highly educated, with a mother who was a published poet, a lawyer husband, and a sister who owned two houses, experienced signi?cant ?nancial constraints throughout her life and had only minimal social connections, largely in the world of socialist and su?ragist politics. Her comparative lack of access to resources put her functionally in the lower middle class, although her education and interests did not solidly ?t into that class culture. The contrasting Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xxvii xxviii Introduction positions of these women were also re?ected in their access to spatial resources, as will be described in detail throughout the book. For example, although Pierce lived in Berkeley, she visited downtown San Francisco more often than Haskell did. Pierce moved easily throughout the Bay Area, with a sense of comfort wherever she went. In contrast, Haskell’s life was lived primarily in her own neighborhood, and trips beyond it were often marked with discomfort and di?culty. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. San Francisco and Its Downtown This book looks at San Francisco not only because of its particularities but also because in many ways San Francisco was a typical large American city of the turn of the century. Like many cities, particularly in the West, it was largely created after 1850, used grid planning, and was signi?cantly shaped by public transportation. San Francisco began as a small Mexican settlement and grew quickly after the discovery of gold in 1848. While early on San Francisco was disproportionately male and had a reputation as a lawless town, by the 1890s its white population was nearly 50 percent female, and it had a big city’s sophistication, with museums, private clubs, and high-end theatrical entertainments.28 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries San Francisco was a thriving and expanding mercantile and manufacturing metropolis.29 By the early 1890s, with a population of 298,997, it was the eighth largest city in the United States and the only city west of St. Louis to rank among the ?fty largest U.S. cities.30 In 1910, in the wake of the massive destruction of the 1906 earthquake and ?re, San Francisco was still the eleventh largest city in the United States.31 Until the 1920s, it was the most important city in the American West. The city of San Francisco grew outward from a settlement clustered near San Francisco Bay in an area that became, by the turn of the century, its downtown (Figure I.8). This originally settled area is bisected by Market Street, leading from the Ferry Building (which connected San Francisco to the East Bay and the rest of the United States) southwest into the rest of city (Figure I.9). Two di?erent grids extend from Market north and south. North of Market lie the ?nancial and shopping districts, Chinatown, and, farther from Market, Nob Hill and North Beach. The area south of Market was mixed at the turn of the century, including warehouses and manufacturing, as well as a densely packed, largely working-class residential population.32 As in other cities, neighborhoods had local main streets, typically transportation spines, which served their neighborhoods with a range of goods and services, including shops, banks, dentists, barbers, and meeting halls for local organizations (Figure I.10). In addition, in San Francisco two of these local main streets, Mission and Fillmore, grew to become district main streets, Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.8. San Francisco, 1852, showing buildings. In 1852, San Francisco’s buildings were concentrated in the area near the port, north of Market Street. The early city set up two main street grids: a smaller north–south grid north of Market Street and a larger northeast–southwest grid, parallel to Market Street, to its south. U.S. Coast Guard Survey, City of San Francisco and Its Vicinity, 1852. Courtesy of Historic Urban Plans, Inc., Ithaca, New York. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. xxx Introduction Figure I.9. San Francisco, 1904. By the early twentieth century, San Francisco had expanded significantly to the west and south of the original settlement near the port. J. B. Chadwick, Map of San Francisco Business District, 1904. Courtesy of the Earth Sciences and Map Library, University of California, Berkeley. providing a wider range of goods and services in a more specialized space and serving as substitutes for Market Street immediately after the 1906 earthquake and ?re. Turn-of-the-century downtown San Francisco, like other modern downtowns, was a specialized space of shopping and commerce, with only hotel residences along Market Street. This is in marked contrast to American cities a century earlier, when both o?ces and shops were typically combined with the living quarters of those who worked in them. In San Francisco, the ?re following the 1906 earthquake made this specialization more acute, because institutions such as museums, churches, and synagogues, as well as the owners of destroyed buildings that had included living spaces, found it easy to sell o? their now-empty lots at a pro?t and move to new locations, accelerating the changes already underway in the downtown. This new specialized space was supported by a network of streetcars, cable Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure I.10. Local and district main streets in retail districts, San Francisco, 1899. Small local main streets were spread throughout the city, while larger and more complex district main streets, particularly in the Mission District, served larger portions of the city. The retail districts are (1) Montgomery Avenue; (2) Broadway; (3) Polk Street; (4) Mission and Valencia Streets; and (5) the downtown. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. xxxii Introduction cars, and ferries that made it possible for workers and shoppers who lived in primarily residential districts to move easily between their homes and downtown. This network was focused on Market Street, the spine of the streetcar network, with the ferry terminal at its base. The importance of Market Street and its focus on the ferry terminal also had consequences for the particular shape of San Francisco’s downtown. While retail and commercial activity expanded southwest, from lower Kearny Street to Union Square, it has never migrated far from Market Street or the ferry terminal, unlike shopping districts in cities such as Chicago and New York, which have moved much farther from their original center because of changes in population and other forces. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Women in San Francisco’s Urban Public Landscape In this book I explore several overlapping urban landscapes and how they were imagined, experienced, and built. In each of the ?rst four chapters I focus on the network of spaces that made up one type of gendered public landscape, noting where they were in the city, tracing how those spaces changed over time, exploring the ways material culture marked these sites as classed and gendered, and investigating how women negotiated them in their everyday lives. By looking both at the larger scale of the entire network of spaces that make up a landscape and at the smaller scale of individual buildings and their design details, I examine how gender was practiced and patterned in the city and how certain gendered practices were represented and reinforced through material culture. In the ?nal chapter I revisit the gendered landscapes discussed in the previous chapters, showing how women’s presence and power within public space had implications for their battle for political rights and for their place in the public sphere. The most public space of all, and that most regularly encountered, is the street, which I discuss in chapter 1. In order to go out, whether to visit any other public place, to work, or to meet friends and relatives, women took to the streets. The streets and streetcars between their homes and their destinations were an important public landscape, the one in which women most frequently appeared. Streets and streetcars were a space of gender-based tension, as evidenced in the debates over appropriate street and streetcar behavior in turn-of-the-century etiquette books. As the consumers for their households, women went out regularly on errands. The spaces of everyday shopping and appointments are explored in chapter 2. Analyzing shopping trips in diaries, I describe three main landscapes of shopping: local daily grocery shopping, short trips to neighborhood and district main streets, and expeditions to the department stores and specialty shops of downtown Market Street. Women’s varied access to and use of these three shopping Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Introduction xxxiii landscapes helped to construct their social positions and a?ected how they engaged with the city as a whole. As women went out in public more often, they also ate in public more often. In chapter 3 I explore the expanding number and variety of institutions serving hungry women at the turn of the century. In the late nineteenth century most restaurants were male spaces, which women would visit only when escorted by men. Middle-class women could eat at all-female department store or hotel tearooms, and working-class women might have eaten at a lunchroom with ladies’ tables or in the ladies’ lounge of a saloon. In the early twentieth century, women increasingly ate out, patronizing a wider range of lunchrooms, tearooms, ice cream parlors, and cafeterias. I trace this change in the context of San Francisco, focusing on how the landscape of eating out connected with other gendered landscapes; which eating places women frequented when and with whom; and how the design of restaurants re?ected their appropriateness as space for women. The public spaces of the city also provided experiences of amusement and spectacle for women, the spaces explored in chapter 4. Unlike shopping, which was sometimes pursued with female companions but often pursued alone, going to amusements was usually done with others, typically with a man or as part of a mixed-sex group. However, over time women increasingly went to places of amusement without men, especially after the introduction of movie theaters. The spectacle of the theater was mirrored by the spectacle of the streets of the downtown, both on ordinary days, when men and women walked the streets at dusk to look at window displays, and on holidays, when the entire street became a space of spectacle for parades. I also explore how women participated in these parades, both as spectators and as actors, and how parades and celebrations recast the gendering of the spaces in which they took place. The consequences of women’s use of public space went beyond simply an increasing comfort and familiarity with that sphere, particularly the downtown. Women’s everyday use of public space had consequences for their position in the public sphere and in politics. In chapter 5, in which I discuss the California woman su?rage campaigns of 1896 and 1911, I revisit the landscapes discussed in previous chapters in the context of the political use of public space. To demand a place in the public sphere, women reworked the uses and meanings of commercial public space, which they rede?ned as a site of political activity. In 1896, such public spaces were used cautiously by su?ragists, but by 1911, su?ragists aggressively rede?ned lunchrooms, stores, streets, streetcars, and theaters as political space. The political use of gendered public space shows the importance of gendered public landscapes to women’s power to act, and the changes between the two campaigns highlight the enormous changes in the gendered public landscape—imagined, built, and experienced—from 1896 to 1911. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-28 13:17:56. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 1 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 36. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=36 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 2 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 37. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=37 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 3 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 38. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=38 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 4 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 39. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=39 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 5 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. 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May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 7 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 42. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=42 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 8 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 43. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=43 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 9 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 44. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=44 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 10 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 45. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=45 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 11 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 46. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=46 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 12 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 47. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=47 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 13 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 48. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=48 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 14 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 49. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=49 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 15 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 50. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=50 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 16 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 51. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=51 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 17 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 52. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=52 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 18 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 53. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=53 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 19 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 54. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=54 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 20 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 55. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=55 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 21 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 56. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=56 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 22 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 57. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=57 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/docPrint.action?encrypted=d1ab1d1... 23 z 24 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. p 58. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/masaryk/Doc?id=10442227&ppg=58 Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 21.1.2013 17:32 FIVE SPACES OF SUFFRAGE Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. IN 1896 AND 1911 , California woman su?ragists fought to win the vote in Cal- ifornia, using a wide range of private and public spaces. In 1896, su?ragists were very concerned with maintaining their propriety and femininity, often acting almost as visitors in public. In contrast, in 1911 su?ragists acted as full participants in public space, secure in their rights to these spaces and willing to speak and sell publicly without fear of censure. In this chapter I examine the spatial tactics of su?ragists in the California woman su?rage campaigns of 1896 and 1911 and argue that women’s use of public spaces, and especially their sense of ownership of these spaces, had consequences beyond their felt relationship to the city. The increased range of nonpolitical public spaces in which women could and did move and act was an important aspect of their claim to political rights as members of the public and their ability to make that claim. As the previous chapters have shown, from 1890 to the 1910s, women made increasing use of a range of public spaces, both as workers and as consumers. Downtown, upper- and middle-class women walked the streets as shoppers, and working women created their own relationships to the public spaces of the downtown as workers in its stores and also as shoppers there. Working-class and middle-class 127 Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. 128 Spaces of Suffrage women also made local main streets their own as consumers. In their everyday movements through the city, whether visiting, shopping, or going to work, women of all classes made use of public transportation and peopled the streets. Eating out, going to the theater, and participating in public spectacles, women made the public spaces of the city their own. Their experience of the public spaces of the city as consumers of goods and services helped to construct women’s relationships to the city and its neighborhoods, creating a sense of ownership over those places they frequented most often and in which they were served and accepted. The California woman su?rage campaigns show that many di?erent kinds of public spaces, including commercial spaces, were important both as spaces of discourse and as spaces that constructed participants’ legitimacy to act as members of the public. The spaces of buying and selling, as well as other ordinary public spaces, are the ground on which the public sphere, a space of discourse in which people debate the public good, is built.1 The importance of ordinary public spaces in constructing an argument for participation in the formalized political public sphere is demonstrated by the di?erences between the woman su?rage campaign in San Francisco in 1896 and the one in 1911. As the Berkeley su?ragist and schoolteacher Fannie McLean argued in her speech to women’s clubs, Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The woman of today takes a larger and more gracious place in the world. We are now co-thinkers and co-workers with man, in the same world, living in the same houses, using the same public conveyances, attending the same colleges, buying our food and clothing at the same shops; and why not be co-voters as to the management of this common environment and as to the basic principles of the democracy which produces this environment?2 McLean argued that women’s everyday use of public space should carry with it full rights in the public sphere, in the form of the right to vote. Women’s ordinary use of public space also denoted a physical space within which they could make their arguments, and California su?ragists made full use of all the public spaces at their disposal in order to convince men to give them the right to vote. In making use of these spaces for political speech, they reimagined them not only as spaces of work and consumption but also as spaces of politics. This shift in how these landscapes were imagined sometimes led to su?ragists’ making physical changes in them and altered how they and others experienced them and women’s roles within them. Using Space in the California Woman Suffrage Campaigns The contrasts between the spaces used in the California woman su?rage campaign of 1896 and the campaign of 1911, only ?fteen years apart, demonstrate the Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Spaces of Suffrage 129 signi?cant transformations in women’s relationships to public space during the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, which the previous chapters of this book have documented. The unsuccessful 1896 campaign used a much smaller range of spaces than the successful 1911 campaign, and private spaces constituted a larger portion of them. The sites used in 1896 were also more controlled and enclosed than those used in 1911. Women’s expanding use of public space in their everyday lives gave them a wider base from which to argue for their rights. As discussed in earlier chapters, women’s expanding use of public spaces was uneven by class and ethnicity, and the actions of the woman su?ragists in both 1896 and 1911 re?ect the variations among women in terms of which spaces they engaged and in what manner. At the turn of the century, su?ragists were working to pass amendments to state constitutions to get the vote on a state-by-state basis, rather than focusing on a federal amendment. Although a federal amendment had been proposed in 1878, by Senator A. A. Sargent, of California, whose wife was a prominent San Francisco su?ragist, it was rejected numerous times and was not even considered by U.S. Senate or House committees between the years of 1896 and 1913.3 In this hostile federal atmosphere, su?ragists turned to the states, hoping to build up women’s rights and in?uence piecemeal in order to win su?rage eventually in all the states. Only ?ve states gave women the vote prior to the California victory in 1911. Wyoming granted the vote to women from its beginnings as a territory in 1869 and was admitted to the union as a woman su?rage state in 1890. Colorado amended its constitution to allow women the vote in 1893. These were the only states in which women had the vote at the time of the 1896 California campaign. In 1896, two additional western states, Utah and Idaho, joined Wyoming and Colorado. Fourteen years later, in 1910, the people of Washington amended its state constitution to give women the vote. The California campaign helped to turn the tide, and California’s 1911 victory was followed by Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, Illinois in 1913, Montana and Nevada in 1914, and several other states soon afterward. These state victories helped lead to the passage of the federal amendment in 1920. In both the 1896 and the 1911 California campaigns, su?ragists fought ?rst to get a referendum on su?rage on the ballot, and once they had achieved this, they worked to convince the men of the state to vote for it. Although su?ragists used a variety of spaces and tactics in an attempt to reach a large number of men in both campaigns, the unsuccessful campaign of 1896 was waged primarily in the traditional public political spaces of commercial halls and in the private spaces of suffragists’ parlors and voters’ homes. The campaign was organized by one central su?rage organization, which was closely tied to the East Coast woman su?rage movement and had a membership that consisted mainly of upper-middle-class, Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 130 Spaces of Suffrage white, nonimmigrant women, although it did include less elite women such as Annie Haskell. Fifteen years later, in 1911, su?ragists made use of these same spaces but also moved into retail and commercial spaces, commercial places of entertainment, and the streets, using techniques of persuasion borrowed from these realms. The 1911 California woman su?rage campaign was the largest and broadest waged in the United States to that date and borrowed some strategies from the radical suffragettes in England. This campaign was actually several interlocking campaigns, waged by organizations as diverse as the College Equal Su?rage League, largely made up of middle- and upper-class educated women, many of whom were active in other sorts of reform activities; the Club Women’s Franchise League, a largely elite group; the Wage Earners’ Su?rage League, closely tied to the Waitresses’ Union; and a coalition organization, the State Central Committee, that coordinated e?orts.4 Each of these groups made use of di?erent sets of spaces, with the least overlap in the polite space of hotels, used mostly by the club women, and the streets, which were never used by the Club Women’s Franchise League and were used most actively by the middle-class reformers. The 1911 campaign also targeted voters beyond the middle and upper classes. Focusing on working-class voters, the Wage Earners’ Su?rage League addressed all 185 unions in the city.5 Newspaper coverage in the Call emphasized the support of the union members for su?rage, reporting, for example, “The postal clerks gave their indorsement by a rising vote in which every man in the hall rose to his feet Saturday night. The pattern makers pledged themselves to a man.”6 Members of the Wage Earners’ Su?rage League did not con?ne their speeches to union meetings but also spoke to workers “at political meetings in the districts where the workingmen live” and “in the factories and foundries where they toil.”7 For example, on October 2, 1911, they held noonday meetings in the city’s lumberyards and the Union Iron Works, and on October 6, 1911, su?ragists spoke at various places along the waterfront and again at the Union Iron Works.8 Interestingly, the Union Iron Works was also the only workplace where a su?rage address was reported in 1896.9 Other su?rage organizations also spoke to workers at their workplaces, targeting di?erent classes of workers. Members of the Club Women’s Franchise League visited commission and wholesale houses and railway o?ces to speak to employees there about su?rage, and the College Equal Su?rage League spoke to schoolteachers in the public schools and addressed merchants’ employees during their noon hour.10 Middle-class reformist su?ragists self-consciously addressed voters of racial and ethnic backgrounds di?erent from their own. Churches were used as a space to speak to African American voters in both the 1896 and the 1911 campaigns. At least three addresses were made in 1896 in African American churches, by Naomi Anderson at the African American Baptist church on Powell Street on July 31 and Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Spaces of Suffrage 131 at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, on Stockton Street, on July 30, where Susan B. Anthony also spoke on May 3.11 In 1911, a large meeting was held at the Third Baptist Church, at Hyde and Clay Streets, presided over by Julia Sanborn, “well known in almost every state of the union as a missionary among the colored people.”12 This use of a missionary as a speaker is expressive of the relationship between less powerful groups and su?ragists, who were often middleclass reformers doing settlement and other reform work with immigrants and the poor. In the 1911 campaign, su?ragists, particularly those active in the College Equal Su?rage League, also courted immigrants. Su?rage ?yers were printed in Italian, French, German, Portuguese, and Chinese (Figure 5.1), and advertisements were run in all the foreign papers in San Francisco and Oakland during the last week of the campaign.13 Because su?ragists “found that it was impossible to get foreigners . . . to come out to . . . public meetings,” they also used other means to target immigrant populations. For example, a committee of the College Equal Su?rage League arranged to give a talk on woman su?rage to every gathering of every German association in San Francisco.14 Su?ragists similarly spoke to meetings of French and Italian groups. In addition, mass meetings were held in Swedish, French, and Italian to target those populations. These meetings were held in prominent locations within the immigrant neighborhoods; for example, a mass meeting addressing the Italian population was held at the Italian theater in North Beach. At these meetings most speeches were given in the native language of the immigrant population, by prominent members of their community as well as by native-born su?ragists. In addition, at the Italian meetings “a vocalist gave several operatic selections” in order to please the audience’s presumed love of music. These meetings were actively announced by street speakers and through advertisements in foreign-language and neighborhood papers, on window cards in shop windows, and on ?yers distributed throughout the neighborhoods.15 In both the 1896 and the 1911 campaigns, su?ragists made use of both domestic spaces and public spaces, engaging each of these realms with di?erent sets of tactics. Any targeted group, whether workers, immigrants, or the elite, was addressed both within the private spaces of their homes and the homes of their acquaintances and within the public spaces of churches, public halls, workplaces, streets, shops, and commercial amusements, although, as we’ve seen, the public realm was much more heavily engaged in 1911. Politics in Private Space: Engaging the Domestic Women employed domestic space as political space for practical and ideological reasons. In addition to being inexpensive, domestic space evoked the home as the Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure 5.1. Multilingual suffrage flyers, 1911. California suffragists targeted a number of immigrant groups, including French, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Spaces of Suffrage 133 woman’s sphere. This gave su?ragists a certain latitude in how they employed domestic space, as well as making it a proper space for women to use. By engaging the home as a political space and by using the social conventions of tea parties and visits as the bases for their political activism, su?ragists underlined their femininity and made their political activity seem nonthreatening. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Domestic Space: Using Private Space for Public Purposes Because women were associated with and had the most access to domestic space, su?ragists often used this space for meetings. Parlor meetings is a term encountered early in the California su?rage ?ght. In April 1896, before the o?cial push to organize precinct clubs, the Call wrote that su?rage leaders had “decided to adopt the plan of parlor su?rage meetings conducted with such success in the east. Already clubs are organized in each district.”16 These parlor meetings were similar, if not identical, to precinct club meetings, and the article implied that they were organized, or at least conceived of, in relation to the political space of the district. However, the term parlor meeting emphasizes their hominess rather than their organization based on political maps. This term expressed a desire to conceive of these meetings as part of a private landscape of domesticity. In a parlor meeting, politics was domesticated, and su?rage meetings were imagined primarily not as part of a political network but rather as part of a social network of likeminded women. Neighborhood su?rage-club meetings in 1896 were probably held at the houses of leading local su?ragists who had enough space to accommodate a meeting. Annie Haskell referred to several of the meetings she went to in 1896 as “parlor meetings,” although she only once mentioned in whose parlor a meeting was held. That meeting was at the house of Mrs. Sargent, the prominent su?ragist and wife of Senator A. A. Sargent, who had proposed a federal su?rage amendment in 1878.17 Across the bay in Berkeley and Oakland, meetings were held in the private homes of precinct presidents and other activists, such as Mary (Mrs. William) Keith, the secretary of the Alameda County su?rage organization.18 These parlor meetings had an important practical advantage: they did not require signi?cant ?nancial outlay. In contrast, men’s organizations more often had access to rooms in clubs, union halls, and the o?ces in which members worked. This world of nondomestic, semiprivate spaces was less accessible to women, although not entirely so.19 Public halls could also be rented for meetings and often were for other organizations. Because 1896 was a presidential election year, many political organizations had precinct- and district-level clubs with regular meetings. The precinct club meetings announced or reported in the three major San Francisco daily papers, the Chronicle, the Call, and the Examiner, were those of Republican and Democratic Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 134 Spaces of Suffrage clubs. When a meeting place was mentioned, it was most often “at their headquarters,” which implies that these organizations had o?ces of some sort at the district level, unlike the Woman Su?rage Association, which had an o?ce only at the state or city level, and then only well after the campaign had begun. Local meetings of political parties were also held in other public halls and spaces but were never listed as meeting in private homes. Renting space in a hall for a small-scale meeting was an expense, but the decision to hold meetings in su?ragists’ home parlors rather than public halls was likely a cultural and strategic choice more than a ?nancial one. Because a major purpose of precinct meetings was outreach to the neighborhood, holding meetings in the parlors of private homes was symbolically useful, because it marked them as occasions of friendship and sociability, as much as of political action. A meeting in a home could almost masquerade as a tea party or sociable visiting; the space of the parlor put these gatherings into the imagined realm of the domestic, even as the substance of and access to the meeting were public. Su?rage leaders recognized the importance of sociability as a way of pulling in potential converts to the su?rage cause; one of the important points of their action plan after the defeat of the amendment in 1896 was to “interest the young people in a series of entertainments, dances, contests, socials, teas, campaign songs.”20 Holding smaller meetings in parlors rather than public halls also associated the su?rage movement with the home, the “proper” place for women. Antisu?ragists often based their arguments against su?rage on the idea that giving women the vote would threaten the centrality of the home for women and destroy its sanctity. Su?ragists countered by describing the vote as an extension of women’s duties in the home, a way for women to protect the health and morality of their children.21 The argument that motherhood provided a logical basis for public power was not limited to the su?rage movement; arguments for reform politics of all sorts, from city beauti?cation to welfare, often displayed the image of woman as a maternal ?gure, housekeeper of the city, protecting her children and all children by exerting her moral power to keep the city clean, safe, and good.22 However, the term parlor meeting was also not without its problems in 1896, because the emphasis on domesticity embodied in the term could undermine the political seriousness of the su?ragists’ endeavor. Therefore, the su?rage organization eventually downplayed that term in favor of a more gender-neutral term. After the Call ?rst mentioned the formation of small clubs and referred to their meetings as “parlor meetings,”23 emphasizing the feminine nature of the space where the meetings took place, later articles replaced parlor meeting with precinct meeting, emphasizing the tie between su?rage-club organization and the formal landscape of male electoral politics. This shift made 1896 su?rage-club meetings potentially part of two imagined landscapes: the landscape of domesticity and the Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Spaces of Suffrage 135 landscape of politics. This ambiguous imagining was highly expressive of the di?cult tightrope su?ragists were trying to walk. They were simultaneously demanding a formal role in the public sphere and reassuring voters that they did not desire to change women’s social roles, arguing, for example, that it was precisely because they were mothers that women needed the vote. Just as domestic spaces were used in 1896 to emphasize the femininity and propriety of su?ragists, the imagery of domestic spaces was also transposed onto public spaces in order to feminize them. For example, the 1896 su?rage headquarters, in a rented downtown o?ce directly behind the facade of the Emporium department store building, functioned similarly to a parlor. An August 18, 1896, article in the Call, “Su?ragist ‘At Homes,’ New Social Feature to Be Inaugurated during the Present Week,” described fortnightly evening receptions to be held in the Woman Su?rage Bureau o?ces for women “whose occupations at home or at work prevent[ed] their visiting the bureau during o?ce hours.” These receptions were referred to as evenings “at home,” with Mary E. Hay as the “hostess par excellence.” The evening receptions, and perhaps the reception of visitors during regular o?ce hours, functioned much as visiting hours and days did for a re?ned lady in her parlor, and the language of polite visiting was used to refer to the Su?rage Association in much the same way as it was for a lady in the society pages. Similarly, in 1911 the Oakland Su?rage Amendment League announced weekly at-homes in their headquarters in the Albany Block, on Broadway in Oakland. The Examiner announced that this o?ce would be opened with a “su?rage housewarming,” elaborating, “All their friends have been cordially invited . . . and true hospitality in the shape of equality tea, will be dispensed by the receiving party.”24 The 1896 su?rage headquarters was also feminized and domesticated through its decoration, which made use of the style and accoutrements of a domestic parlor, including draperies, parlor tables, throw rugs, ?owers, and plants (Figure 5.2). A short note at the end of an article about the Woman Su?rage Bureau headquarters stated, “The lady managers of the bureau desire to return special thanks to the kind friends who keep the rooms fragrant and lovely by means of their generous donations of ?owers.”25 This emphasized the “lovely” feminine quality of the o?ce and downplayed any relation it may have borne to typical “rational” masculine o?ce decor and function.26 Flowers were similarly used to feminize meeting halls and other public spaces and were even used to decorate polling places the ?rst time San Francisco women voted.27 Not only did ?owers add color and otherwise visually feminize a space; their scent similarly marked the space as feminine, masking and counterbalancing the scent of cigar smoke of traditional male politics. In the 1911 campaign also, individual su?ragists’ houses were used as sites for sociable meetings, but su?ragists worked to associate these meeting with the imagined spaces of politics rather than those of domesticity. They dropped the term Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 136 Spaces of Suffrage Figure 5.2. Woman Suffrage Bureau headquarters, 1896. The headquarters were located in an office space in the facade of the Emporium. They were feminized through the use of plants, draperies, rugs, and parlor tables, all items that furnished domestic parlors. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. parlor meeting, which emphasized the private space of the parlor, in favor of terms such as su?rage tea and su?rage reception, which described activities that sometimes took place in hotels and other nondomestic spaces. Teas and receptions remained part of a feminine realm of sociability, but a realm familiar from semipublic club and charity work and thus not necessarily tied to the domestic realm. This renaming also emphasized the political purpose of the meeting by using suffrage in the term, while the 1896 term parlor meeting was more coy about the reason for the meeting. Regular “pink teas” were also held every Wednesday and Thursday from mid-August through the October 1911 election by the Club Women’s Franchise League to win over anti-su?ragists. These teas masqueraded as purely sociable occasions, to which anti-su?rage women were invited. After the guests had been “made perfectly comfortable with tea, wafers, and conversation about their babies and their cooks . . . a little su?rage [was] adroitly applied.” According to the Chronicle, “That the achievement [support for the su?rage cause] is ?nally Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City : Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uva/detail.action?docID=648105. Created from uva on 2020-04-29 07:19:20. Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Spaces of Suffrage 137 reached . . . is inevitable, because no woman is permitted to go until her name is enrolled as a member of the league. . . . Mrs. Johnson [a member of the Club Women’s Franchise League] not only enrolls her new members, but provides against any backsliding by immediately putting them to work on their anti-neighbors by suggesting that they themselves set other dates for more pink teas.”28 Some su?rage teas were described in the newspaper in purely social terms, much like the items of social news that shared the In Woman’s World page with su?rage events in the Call or the “What Society Is Doing” column that ran next to the “Doings of the Women’s Clubs” column, which detailed su?rage activities in the Chronicle.29 For example, an item i.