An edited volume exploring the role women played in California politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Women in public office are often assumed to "make a difference" for women, as women--in other words, to represent their female constituents better than do their male counterparts. But is sex really an accurate predictor of a legislator's political choices and actions? In this book, Beth Reingold compares the representational activities and attitudes of male and female members of the Arizona and California state legislatures to illuminate the broader implications of the election and integration of women into public office. In the process, she challenges many of the assumptions that underlie popular expectations of women and men in politics. Using in-depth interviews, survey responses, and legislative records, Reingold actually uncovers more similarities between female and male politicians than differences. Moreover, the stories she presents strongly suggest that rather than assuming that who our representatives are determines what they will do in office, we must acknowledge the possibility that the influence of gender on legislative behavior can be weakened, distorted, or accentuated by powerful forces within the social and political contexts of elective office.

This book explores the campaign history of California’s women legislators and the increasingly complex strategies they used in efforts to transcend gender barriers when running for office from 1912 to 1970. Nearly 500 women ran on the primary ballots, re-gendering the political landscape while struggling against a recurring historical amnesia.

This book explores the campaign history of California's women legislators and the increasingly complex strategies they used in efforts to transcend gender barriers when running for office from 1912 to 1970. Nearly 500 women ran on the primary ballots, re-gendering the political landscape while struggling against a recurring historical amnesia.

In 1880, Californians believed a woman safeguarded the Republic by maintaining a morally sound home. Scarcely forty years later, women in the state won full-fledged citizenship and voting rights by stepping outside the home to engage in robust activism. Gayle Gullett reveals how this enormous transformation came about and the ways women's search for a larger public life led to a flourishing women's movement in California. Though voters rejected women's radical demand for citizenship in 1896, women rebuilt the movement in the early years of the twentieth century and forged critical bonds between activist women and the men involved in the urban Good Government movement. This alliance formed the basis of progressivism, with male Progressives helping to legitimize women's new public work by supporting their civic campaigns, appointing women to public office, and placing a suffrage referendum before the male electorate in 1911. Placing local developments in a national context, Becoming Citizens illuminates the links between women's reform movements and progressivism in the American West.

"This biography of Rose Elizabeth Bird is an overdue look at California's first female supreme court chief justice, against the backdrop of California's political and cultural climate in the 1970s and 1980s"--