Suffragist Movement Archives - Page 2 of 2

Petaluma’s First Suffragist Leader

Barnabus, William, and Abigail Haskell, circa 1852 (photo by Charles Hamilton, courtesy of Ann Nisson)

On March 18, 1870, Abigail Goodwin Haskell arrived in Sacramento from Petaluma to address the California State Assembly. Having recently been elected president of the newly formed California Woman Suffrage Association, she carried with her a petition signed by 3,000 Californians, 400 of them from Petaluma, calling for an amendment granting women the right to vote. As the first woman to address a select committee of the state assembly, she got straight to the point. “We claim to be recognized as citizens of this free Republic!”

It was not a request but a demand, one that continues to resonate today, 150 years later, with the persistent campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

The twelve months leading up to Haskell’s historic Sacramento appearance was something of a watershed moment for the women’s rights movement. It began with news that Wyoming and Utah had become the first U.S. territories to award women the vote, followed a few months later by the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In December of 1869, Haskell—Petaluma’s first female public school principal—called a meeting of activists at her home on 4th Street between B and C streets to form the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. Many who responded were involved with Haskell in local temperance fraternities, but a handful also shared her belief in Spiritualism.

Abigail Haskell’s “Rose Cottage,” 523 B Street at Sixth Street, which she allegedly occupied in late life (photo by Scott Hess)

Inspired in part by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg—a Swedish philosopher whose revelatory claims into Christian theology were buttressed with visions, trances, and dreams—Spiritualism asserted that all of life was spiritual and an expression of the divine. Its main attraction was a belief in the immortality of the soul, which, at a time when early death was commonplace, offered solace to many, including Abigail Haskell and her husband Barnabus, who had lost their young daughter.

Spiritualism’s other attraction was its rebellion against authority. Direction didn’t come from ministers but from mediums or trance speakers—the most prominent of whom were female—called to their positions by spirits of the dead. Freed from the yoke of traditional values and institutions, Spiritualists endorsed some of the more radical reforms of the nineteenth century, including temperance, marriage reform, labor reform, children’s rights, pacifism, and socialism.

Spiritualism helped many women find their voice, producing not only the first large group of female religious leaders, but also the first sizable number of women to address large public gatherings, away from the hierarchical environment of churches and the patriarchal environment of the home. The early California suffrage movement relied almost exclusively on trance speakers to recruit followers.

Haskell and her husband Barnabus, who owned a dry goods store in town, were longtime members of the Swedenborg Church which, with its ministers and doctrines, placed them on the conservative end of the Spiritualist spectrum. But Haskell believed with Spiritualists that obtaining the vote was merely the first step in securing equal rights for women. Having devoted her life to teaching—one of the few professions open to women in the mid-19th century—she championed women’s access to higher education.

Abigail Goodwin Haskell (photo courtesy of Ann Nisson)

Speaking before the state assembly committee, she cited her experience of having attended high school in Connecticut with boys preparing to enter nearby Harvard or Yale. Although equally qualified, she said she was prevented from joining them “on the basis of my sex alone, in accordance with the absurd customs and time-honored usages of the past.” She equated such practices with those of a Muslim harem.

Haskell’s efforts in Sacramento failed, as did other California suffrage efforts throughout the 1870s, blocked by the then Southern-affiliated, conservative Democratic Party, which functioned much like today’s Republican Party which has blocked passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1879, Frances Willard assumed the helm of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Declaring a motto of “do everything,” she expanded the Union’s mission to include suffrage and other social reforms. Inspired by her vison, Abigail Haskell, along with Mary E. Cogdon and other Petaluma women, formed California’s first chapter of the WCTU. With Haskell serving as chapter president, they hosted the inaugural convention of the California WCTU in Petaluma.

In 1883, her health failing, Abigail Haskell welcomed Willard to town, where she lectured to a packed house. A year later Haskell died at age 64. Befitting a fallen crusader, she was conveyed to her gravesite at Cypress Hill Cemetery in a white coffin atop a white hearse of white plumes and drapes, drawn by six white horses.

Versions of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 5, 2020, and the Sonoma Historian, 2o2o, Vol. 2.

Petaluma Suffragist Josephine P. Hill

Josie Hill (photo courtesy of Melissa Hill Spease)

A member of Petaluma’s early rivertown aristocracy, Josephine Pilkington Hill came from humble beginnings. Born in 1841, in Troy, New York, to James Pilkington, a traveling salesman, and Margaret Lonnon Pilkington, she traveled at the age of twelve with her parents and two brothers west across the plains by wagon train to Oregon.

In 1862, at the age of twenty, Josie made her way to San Francisco, where she met and married William B. Hill (1829-1902), also a native of New York, who had come to California to mine for gold in 1852, and then settled in the town of Petaluma in Sonoma County as a merchant and farmer. Over the first twelve years of their marriage, Josie gave birth to four sons.

In 1866, William used his riches to help form the Bank of Sonoma County, serving as its president until 1886, when he established the banking firm of William Hill & Son. By then, Hill was among the area’s largest landowners with 6,000 acres in Sonoma and Marin counties, including a 200-acre vineyard and winery. He also owned land in Mexico.

Despite William’s winery enterprise, Josie was an early temperance activist. A devoted member of the Christian Scientist Church, whose teachings informed her political and civic engagement, she attended the inaugural convention Pacific Coast Woman Suffrage Association in 1871 as a Petaluma delegate with other local temperance supporters. In 1879, she served as a founding member of Sonoma-Marin Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the first WTCU chapter formed in California, embracing the “do everything” reform initiative of the Union’s president, Frances Willard, whom the chapter welcomed to town in 1883.

In 1896, as California suffragists rallied behind a state ballot amendment granting women the right to vote, Josie became a charter member of Petaluma’s Political Equality Club, sponsored by the California Woman Suffrage Association, serving later as the club’s vice president. That same year the new club welcomed Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to town.

Hill Opera House, Keller and Washington streets, built 1904 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

After the unexpected death of her husband William in 1902—which came soon after the deaths of three of her adult sons from tuberculosis—Josie and her surviving son Alexander built the Hill Opera House at Washington and Keller streets in William’s memory. Deemed by Josie “a temple of the thespian,” it was heralded as one of the finest playhouses in the state.

Josie also played a critical role in the development of the Petaluma Woman’s Club, donating the club a valuable piece of real estate on Washington Street, the sale of which they used to help fund construction of their B Street clubhouse in 1913.

The Hill mansion at 106 Seventh Street (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

At her stately Victorian home at 106 Seventh Street in Petaluma, Josie hosted numerous gatherings over the years of the WCTU, Political Equality Club, and Woman’s Club, and held elaborate luncheons for visiting speakers to town. Josie also made her house and the Hill Opera House available for religious services and lectures of the Christian Scientist Church, as the local congregation lacked a church building at the time. A generous philanthropist, she served as president of the Antietam Women’s Relief Corp and a trustee of the Harold Meacham Relief Fund.

Josie passed in 1918 after a long illness at the age of seventy-six, and was buried in the Hill Family plot at Cypress Hill Cemetery.

SOURCES:

Illustrated History of Sonoma County, Lewis Publishing Company, 1889

Petaluma Courier: Princely Philanthropy,” November 6, 1892; G.A.R. Installation,” January 13, 1893; “For Equal Suffrage,” October 30, 1896; “Equal Suffrage,” September 28, 1896; “James Vincent Hill,” July 15, 1899; June 24, 1899; William Hill,” July 31, 1902: “New Equality Club is Organized,” December 3, 1903; “A Christian Science Lecture,” June 18, 1909; August 15, 1909; September 7, 1911.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Woman Suffrage,” January 20, 1871.

Petaluma Argus: “W.C.T.U.,” June 13, 1878.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Pioneer Woman Crosses the Divide,” January 10, 1918.

The Swedenborgian Suffragist Sarah Myers Latimer

Born in 1826 in Lambertville, New Jersey, Sarah Myers Rich Latimer was the sixth child of Abraham Dillion Myers (1789-1872) and Martha Preston Gillingham (1788-1844). Shortly after losing her mother at the age of nineteen, Sarah married John Pennington Rich (1815-1862), a construction engineer, and moved with him on his various assignments around Massachusetts and ultimately to Portland, Maine, where she was introduced to the teachings of the Swedenborgian Church which would influence her life going forward.

Over the next fifteen years Sarah gave birth to three boys, one of whom died in infancy, and two girls. In 1862, the family sailed to California via the Isthmus of Panama route, where they settled on a 480-acre ranch of fruit trees, cattle, and mineral springs in town of Windsor, Sonoma County, adjacent to farms of Sarah’s father and brother, who had settled there in the mid-1850s. Sarah named the ranch Glen Valley Springs. Tragically, Sarah’s husband John died from malaria six months after their arrival, leaving Sarah to run the ranch.

In 1865, Sarah married thirty-five year old Lorenzo Dow Latimer (1830-1901), a Santa Rosa attorney, whose first two wives had died prematurely, each leaving him with a young child. A prominent leader of the Sonoma County Republican Party, he ran unsuccessfully for the state senate the year he married Sarah, followed by two unsuccessful campaigns for county judge. In December, 1869, he was appointed California’s U.S. District Attorney, a position based in San Francisco that he held for the next decade.

That same month, Sarah participated in the formation of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association held at the Petaluma home of fellow Swedenborgian, Abigail Haskell. In late January, 1870, she accompanied Haskell to the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association in San Francisco, where Haskell was elected president and Sarah vice president. Sarah also became an officer of the local chapter of the International Order of Good Templars, a national temperance organization promoting abstinence (a position she may have modified once she and Lorenzo added a large vineyard to their ranch).

In 1871, Sarah accompanied Haskell’s husband Barnabus, a prominent Petaluma dry good merchant, to Chicago on the new transcontinental railroad, to attend the annual Swedenborg Church convention. Barnabus had faithfully traveled to Chicago or to an east coast city to the convention ever summer since settling in Petaluma in the mid-1850s.

In 1880, Lorenzo was appointed to fill the eight-month term of the deceased Superior Court Judge of San Francisco, after which he maintained a law partnership in San Francisco until 1886. During the early years that Lorenzo worked in San Francisco, the couple commuted between Glen Valley Springs and the city, where Sarah remained engaged with the California Woman Suffrage Association, participated in philanthropic affairs, including the founding of the Hospital for Children, and served as a delegate to the national regional Swedenborgian conventions.

She also joined the board of the California Women’s Silk Culture Association, an initiative by women suffragists in the 1880s to foster the cultivation of mulberry trees and silk production as a means of providing work to unemployed women and children.

In 1878, Sarah returned full time to her ranch, which had grown to almost 1,000 acres, and converted it into a hot springs resort, which she managed with the help of her son William Rich. She passed away in 1904, a few years after her husband, surrounded by her family at Glen Valley Springs.

SOURCES:

Elinor Rich, Along Family Lines, the family history of the Rich Family, Windsor Museum & Historical Society.

Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct. 1963) pp. 225-234.

Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).

Journals of 37th-46th General Conventions of the New Jerusalem: General convention of the Church of New Jerusalem (Swedenborg Church) in Chicago, June 9-13, 1871.

New Church Messenger, Vol. 88, 1904, “Latimer,” p. 211.

Oakland Tribune: November 17, 1886.

Petaluma Argus: “Appointed,” December 18, 1869; May 14, 1870.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “The Death of William B. Rich,” April 27, 1933.

Petaluma Courier: May 19, 1880: “Former Local Woman Dead,” January 29, 1925.

Sacramento Bee: “Deaths,” February 20, 1858; “Marriages,” November 27, 1860; “Deaths,” October 8, 1864; “State, County, and City Officers,” December 24, 1880.

San Francisco Call: “Swedenborgian Church,” October 13, 1895.

San Francisco Chronicle, “Hospital for Children,”, January 13, 1887.

San Francisco Examiner: “ The City’s Vote,” November 5, 1880; Ad, March 9, 1881; “Silk Culture,” January 21, 1882; “The Juice of the Grape,” January 11, 1887.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Death of Mrs. Latimer,” March 9, 1904.

Sonoma Democrat: March 31, 1859.

Ellen Hulett Button, Suffragist

Born in 1839, in Danby, Vermont, to Silas Hulett (1807-1895), a farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Campbell (1808-1896), at the age of eighteen, Ellen Hulett married Isaac V. Button (1835-1929), also of Danby. In 1861, the couple, along with members of their extended family, moved to Petaluma, California, where they built a house at 641 D Street near 7th Street, then the outskirts of town. Between 1863 and 1878 Ellen gave birth to eight children, only two of which, Isaac Monte Button (1878-1945) and Mabel Ella Button Brown (1869-1963), survived beyond infancy.

While Isaac occupied himself with cattle and horse breeding, Ellen served as founding treasurer of the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, launched at the B Street home of her Petaluma neighbor Abigail Haskell, and signed the 1870 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage presented to the California State Legislature. In 1873, the Button family moved to the new mining town of Spring City, Nevada, where Isaac acquired the 64,000 acre Double-Square Ranch, turning it into the West Coast’s most extensive horse breeding ranch.

In 1892, the couple separated and then divorced, with Ellen returning to Petaluma while Isaac remained at his ranch in Nevada. The family house on D Street was moved to the back of the lot fronting E Street, and the front part of the lot sold odd to Frank Denman, who built a new home.

Back in Petaluma, Ellen became actively involved in the suffrage movement through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, writing regularly for the Petaluma Courier newspaper as the union’s local press superintendent under the initials “E.H.B.,” and later serving as the local chapter’s president. Like scores of other evangelical Protestant women, she embraced the WCTU’s intersectional motto of “do everything,” making the case that as the morally superior sex women needed the vote to act as “citizen-mothers” in protecting their homes and curing a host of society’s ills, many of them rooted in alcohol consumption.

Following the 1893 veto by California governor of a suffrage bill passed by the state legislature, Ellen confronted the local opposition. “It is hard perhaps for one not in the work to realize,” she wrote, “what women have done in the busy walks of life towards creating a public sentiment that gradually places women foremost in all great reforms, as she ever has been in the church and in the home.”

In 1896, as California male voters were offered a referendum on approving a Sixth Amendment to the state constitution granting women the vote, Ellen helped to form the Petaluma Political Equality Club to advocate for its passage, and served as it founding president. At the request of the California Woman Suffrage Central Committee, she organized similar suffrage clubs in Napa County during the campaign for the suffrage referendum, which was ultimately defeated. In her writings and public talks she communicated to women a message of courage.

In 1902, Ellen helped to form a new Petaluma Equality Club to continued agitating for women suffrage, hosting regular meetings at her home as the club’s president.

An active member and clerk of Petaluma’s First Congregational Church, during the 1890s Ellen ran the church’s Petaluma Chinese Mission School, one of sixteen such California schools co-founded by the former Petaluma pastor William C. Pond. Although the Chinese Exclusion Acts had greatly decreased enrollment, the night school offered instruction in English and Christianity to Chinese servants for the sole purpose, as Ellen wrote in a Courier article, of sending them back to China as Christian evangelists.

In 1909, at the age of 70, Ellen reconciled with her husband Isaac, joining him in San Francisco, where he had started a draying business after selling his Nevada ranch. The couple later moved to Berkeley, where Ellen died in 1922 at age 83. She was buried at Cypress Hill Cemetery in Petaluma.

SOURCES:

Petaluma Morning Courier: January 25, 1893, March 18, 1893, March 19, 1893, September 11, 1896, September 28, 1896, October 2, 1896, October 3, 1896, November 6, 1896, May 12, 1897, October 25, 1897, June 15, 1897, July 8, 1897, October 25, 1899, July 7, 1900, October 17, 1900, May 8, 1901, November 1, 1901, September 29, 1902, January 6, 1904, September 25, 1906, August 17, 1909.

Petaluma Argus: September 30, 1902, August 3, 1909, March 17, 1922.

Reno Gazette-Journal: October 1, 1929.

San Francisco Call: September 29, 1896.

San Francisco Chronicle: December 22, 1907.