History is the story of individuals responding creatively to the conditions and circumstances in which they find themselves. At the turn of the 20th century, a group of bold and enterprising Petaluma women seized an opportunity created by such a circumstance, to carve out a public space, and in that space make a voice for themselves at a time when women’s voices in the public arena were neither welcomed nor respected.
The year was 1896. Petaluma’s big annual festive event, The Fourth of July, was approaching. The usual boosters—fraternal clubs, patriotic societies, school marching bands—were gearing up for the usual parade down Main Street as well as for the festivities that followed. There was a new twist to the celebration this year featuring bicycling, which had become a popular craze for both men and women in the Gay Nineties.
The Petaluma Wheelmen, a group of male cyclists led by a young lawyer named Frank Lippitt, were planning to stage the largest bike race Sonoma County had ever seen. Lippitt convinced one of Petaluma’s leading venture capitalists, John McNear, to build the Wheelmen a velodrome track at the agricultural park of the Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society—today’s Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds—completely on spec. Lippitt assured McNear that the Wheelmen will be able to pay him back after the race, given the thousands of tickets they expected to sell to the race to both locals and out of town visitors.
Rena Shattuck, editor of the Petalumian newspaper, saw an opportunity with the race. Given the large number of guests coming to town, Petaluma would need to put its best foot forward. But there was a problem. The two local parks where Fourth of July festivities were traditionally held, were complete eyesores, littered with garbage, overgrown with weeds, and even trampled by livestock. Shattuck proposed that if money was going to be invested in building a racetrack, money should also be spent on tidying up the parks.
It was not the first time the issue of the derelict parks had been raised. Main Street Plaza (now Penry Park) and D Street Plaza (now Walnut Park) had been points of contention since 1852, when Petaluma’s first city planner, the squatter George Keller, established Main Street Plaza in his street layout for the new town. As Petaluma built up around the plaza, local businessmen, unable to imagine a piece of prime real estate in the heart of the downtown that was protected from development, declared the plaza “a waste and a nuisance.”
The city’s board of trustees—precursors to today’s city council—agreed. Over the years they had tried selling the plaza to either raise money for straightening the river or else to turn it into something “useful,” by which they meant a business block, a city hall, a courthouse, a jail, a schoolhouse, or the usual city hall default option, a parking lot. In the meantime, they left the plaza barren, refusing to allocate taxpayer money toward planting trees, building paths and benches, or even supplying water for grass. Their intransigence continued for more than forty years.
The same attitude was largely true for D Street Plaza, originally sold to the city in 1875 at a fifty percent discount by John McNear and Isaac Wickersham, two of the wealthiest men in town. McNear’s large private estate sat kitty corner to the park at D and 4th streets, where the post office and the United Methodist Church stand today. Wickersham owned a big parcel of land extending from 4th and D streets to H street, which he planned to subdivide. A new park provided an attractive anchor to his new housing development, and an enhancement to McNear’s neighborhood.
Wickersham and McNear commissioned a design for the park from attorney Edward S. Lippitt, an amateur horticulturalist, but never acted on it. The city eventually planted a grove of walnut trees in the park in the 1880s, but otherwise allowed the park to be used as grazing pasture for livestock.
For Rena Shattuck, the plazas were not only a public disgrace, but also unsafe for any woman or child who dared to enter them. The founder of Petaluma’s first female-owned newspaper, the weekly Petalumian, Shattuck issued a call-to-action among her female coterie—the wives and daughters of Petaluma’s prominent merchants, doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors, and bankers.
On May 28, 1896, a dozen women gathered in Shattuck’s office in the McCune Building at the northeast corner Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard North, across the street from Main Street Plaza. There, they agreed to form the Petaluma Ladies Improvement Club, whose purpose would be cleaning up the plazas in time for the Fourth of July bike race. Addie Atwater, a local socialite, was elected president. Rena Shattuck, vice president.
Atwater and Shattuck quickly convinced the president of the board of trustees, William Robinson, to grant them an audience at the trustees’ next meeting at city hall, then located on 4th and A streets (the current site of the A Street parking lot). Robinson, owner of a blacksmith and wagon-making company, reportedly agreed to host the women in order “to avoid being talked to death.” At the meeting on June 10th, Atwater, Shattuck, and Daisy Reed, a pianist and wife of a local physician, shared with the trustees their rationale for beautifying the parks.
With the exception of one trustee—William Stratton, owner of Petaluma’s first nursery and known as the state’s “Gum Wizard” for his pioneering cultivation of eucalyptus trees—the women’s arguments fell on deaf ears. Instead, they were peppered with explanations of “the cold facts,” and repeatedly questioned about where they expected the money to come from.
Ultimately, the trustees agreed to provide water to the plazas, but only for the upcoming summer. Addie Atwater assured them that once they saw how beautiful the women had made the plazas, they would want to provide water year-round, for every year going forward.
The Fourth of July bike race was now less than four weeks away. For the Ladies Improvement Club, time was of the essence. Undeterred, the women, led by club president Addie Atwater, decided to raise the money for cleaning up the parks themselves. They did so by forming a women’s minstrel group comprised of the single young “society belles” in the club, including Zoe Fairbanks, Gertrude Hopkins, Lizzie Wickersham, Sallie Jewell, Sarah Cassiday, Ella Johnson, Lena Steitz, Minnie West, Estelle Newberg, Angie Tibbets, and Emma Palmer. The women staged a series of benefit concerts and fundraisers in the Petaluma Theater, known today as the Old Petaluma Opera House, at 147 Kentucky Street, raising $181.75 (roughly $5,000 in early 21st century currency).
The clean-up quickly proceeded with the removal of old tree stumps and cartloads of garbage and discarded tin cans. Being ladies, the club members did not do the physical work themselves, but instead hired male laborers. Emma Palmer, the daughter of a furniture merchant, proved an especially shrewd financier, selling off 10 sacks of cut grass to poultry men as well as the decrepit picket fences surrounding the plazas to cattle ranchers.
The plazas were cleaned up by July 4th, in time for the two thousand visitors who descended upon the city for the Petaluma Wheelmen’s bicycle race. Encouraged by their accomplishment, the Ladies Improvement Club pressed on after the bicycle race, expanding to sixty members, and raising more money by hosting masquerade balls, minstrel shows, carnivals, and even baseball games.
They devoted the money to improving the plazas with pathways, flowerbeds, iron benches, curbs, gutters, and velvety grass lawns. They outfitted D Street Plaza with a well, tank house, windmill, and water fountain donated by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. At Main Street Plaza, they planted 50 date palms, 42 of them a gift from Mary Burdell, owner of the 30,000-acre Burdell Ranch south of town. The remaining eight were donated by local nurseryman and city trustee William Stratton.
The club was also instrumental in renaming D Street Plaza “Walnut Park,” and Main Street Plaza “Hill Plaza,” ignoring critics who sarcastically compared their efforts to rechristening “Chicken Hill” as “Poultry Highlands.”
MUNCIPAL HOUSEKEEPERS
The Petaluma Ladies Improvement Club is believed to have been the first of its kind on the west coast dedicated to civic reform. This was not without controversy at the time, even among women in the community, as a woman stepping into the public arena was looked upon in some quarters as undermining social propriety.
According to historian Paige Meltzer, the women who did justified their efforts as “municipal housekeepers,” working to clean up their cities and improve the health and wellbeing of their neighbors without openly challenging the paternal order of husbands and fathers. And yet, that’s exactly what they were doing. So, how did they pull it off?
To stress how groundbreaking Petaluma’s Ladies Improvement Club was, I’m going to briefly touch upon three of the major women’s clubs in Petaluma at the time— the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, whose local chapter was founded in 1879, and who focused on moral reform; the Petaluma Woman’s Club, formed in 1895, which initially focused exclusively on self-improvement; and the Political Equality Club, which was campaigning in 1896 for placing a amendment on the California ballot providing women with the right to vote.
The 1890s marked the dawning of the Progressive Era, a period of social activism and political reform extending into the 1920s. For women—and I’m speaking here primarily of white, native-born, Protestant, upper- and middle class women—the Progressive Era offered a loosening of many of the repressive attitudes of the Victorian Era. Among them was the division of men and women into different spheres—the public, money-earning work sphere for men, the private, domestic work sphere for women.
This division was enforced by the Victorian code of “true womanhood,” defined as “piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity.” Women were placed on a pedestal as the better, more virtuous sex, and at the same time restricted to that pedestal in terms of agency and field of motion.
During the Progressive Era, new definitions began to evolve as to what was permissible and normal for women. This was driven in large part by upper and middle-class women, who now had leisure time and were demanding greater personal autonomy and a larger role in public life. Limited in their access to higher education, a number of these women began to form women’s clubs focused on self-improvement and continuing education.
The new clubs were markedly different than the organizations that had previously existed for women, such as the auxiliaries to fraternal groups, like the Oddfellow’s Daughters of Rebekah and the Sons of Temperance, or church-related societies focused on charity.
By the mid-1890s, a handful of women’s clubs affiliated with the temperance and suffrage movements had evolved from self-improvement to community improvement, advocating for civic and social reforms such as a woman’s right to vote, child labor laws, better education, library creation, public health, and city beautification. These clubs offered a different kind of improvement for women, serving as training grounds in how to gain influence in a public sphere dominated by men.
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
The Sonoma-Marin chapter of the WCTU, established in 1879, was the first California chapter of the WCTU. It came into existence at the same time that Frances Willard assumed leadership of the national WCTU. Founded in 1874, the WCTU initially set out on a moral crusade against men who spent their paychecks at the saloon and then came home to beat and sexually abuse their wives.
Willard expanded the organization’s mission beyond merely temperance to suffrage and a range of social reforms such as child labor laws that she advocated under the motto “do everything,” along with the campaign slogan: “Agitate-Educate-Legislate.”
The WCTU membership was comprised of upper and middle-class women from evangelical Protestant churches. Anti-immigrant, the Union refused membership to women of the Catholic or Jewish faith, and to women not born in America.
After Willard’s death in 1898, the Union distanced itself from suffrage groups, focusing their mission of “social purity” on eliminating the evils of alcohol, prostitution, and sexual impropriety, especially in the newly emerging technology of motion pictures.
In terms of posing a challenge to the paternal order, the WCTU carefully walked the line by invoking religious morality and the cause of “child-saving”—protecting children from the evils of the world. After denouncing suffrage in 1898, the national organization (but not necessarily the local Sonoma-Marin chapter) regressed to the position that a woman’s place remained in the home.
In Petaluma, the WCTU is best remembered for their granite water fountain at the corner of Western and Main street. Installed in 1891, it has survived numerous collisions with automobiles over the century.
Less known is the other fountain they installed in 1891, that of a statue of the Greek goddess Hebe—cupbearer to the gods—at the southwest corner Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard North.
Hebe was depicted topless in the statue, apparently with hopes of attracting men to the water fountain. In 1913, her nudity became a topic of scandal in some quarters, and she was clothed with a kimono. The fountain was later moved to Walnut Park, after which time it disappeared.
Hebe Statue, Washington and Main streets, 1913 (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)
Petaluma Woman’s Club
The Petaluma Woman’s Club was launched in 1895, a year before the Ladies Improvement Club. It’s membership was comprised of prominent middle and upper class women predominately from St. John’s Episcopalian Church.
The Woman’s Club’s main focus was on self-improvement through literary reading clubs, musical performances, and lectures. The club did not formally adopted civic service as part of its activities until 1909. In 1913, they constructed a clubhouse on B Street between 5th and 6th Streets.
The Political Equality Club
The Petaluma Political Equality Club was established in 1896 by Ellen H. Button, who also served as its president. A suffrage organization, its purpose was advocating for passage of an 1896 amendment to the state constitution providing California women with the right to vote.
A local chapter of the statewide Political Equality Association, the club was part of a decades-long suffrage movement established by Petaluma women that formally began in 1869 with the creation of the Sonoma Country Woman Suffrage Association, of which Ellen Button served as founding treasurer.
After the defeat of the 1896 amendment in California, the Political Equality Club continued to agitate for the vote up until successful passage of a California voting amendment in 1911.
The members of the Petaluma Ladies Improvement Club had surprising little overlap with the three major clubs in town in 1896. A lot of the club’s success can be attributed to three emerging trends in the 1890s that they drew upon: the City Beautiful Movement, women in journalism, and bicycling.
The City Beautiful Movement
The City Beautiful Movement began with the development of urban parks movement in the 19th century. The movement advocated for parks not only for aesthetic appreciation, but a means of creating “green lungs” for cities blighted by the ubiquitous filth and stench of industrialization.
Beginning with the Progressive Era, the urban parks movement expanded to promoting parks as a means of fostering public interaction, social coherence, and democratic equality.
Still, for many city fathers like Petaluma’s board of trustees, parks were largely viewed as drains upon the city treasury, no matter how pretty they looked. What the Ladies Improvement Club demonstrated to the trustees was the value of city beautification in terms they could understand—return on investment.
In the mid-19th century, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted had proven in his design of Central Park in New York City that residences built adjacent to parks or along tree-lined streets with good sidewalks commanded premium prices in the real estate market, resulting in higher property tax revenues for the city, which in turn more than paid for the improvements that had been made, making them good investments.
Known as the “proximate principle,” Olmsted’s findings had been the half-baked impetus behind Wickersham’s and McNear’s creation of Walnut Park in 1873. They just never followed through with beautifying it.
That changed with the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition in Chicago—a world’s fair—which became an influential social and cultural watershed event in terms of ushering in the City Beautiful Movement nationwide, and planting the seeds of modern city planning by providing a vision of what was possible when planners, landscape architects, and architects worked together on a comprehensive city design scheme.
Women in Journalism
Appointed to the Chicago exposition as an official representative from California was a journalist by the name of Anna Morrison Reed. Reed was, by all accounts, a force of nature. A noted speaker, journalist, poet, and publisher, she was a charter member of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association established in 1891, and founder of the west coast literary magazine The Northern Crown in 1904.
Initially based in Ukiah, she relocated her press to Petaluma in 1908, where she launched her own newspaper, the Sonoma County Independent. In 1911, she was chosen to be one of the official speakers of California’s Equal Suffrage Association to campaign for the successful passage that year of the state suffrage amendment. In 1918, she was one of several women who ran for the first time for the California State Assembly, losing by only a few hundred votes.
It’s likely Anna Morrison Reed knew and associated with Rena Shattuck, as Shattuck often made visits to Ukiah in the 1890s to visit her cousin, who had married one of Reed’s daughters. Also, there weren’t that many women journalists in Northern California at the time.
In fact, in the 1890s, only 5% of journalists in the newsroom covering the “hard news” of politics, policy, and business, were women. The majority of women journalists were restricted to writing for the “women’s section,” covering gardening, food, and fashion, or assigned like Rena Shattuck early in her career at her brother’s newspaper the Petaluma Courier, to the society pages (where she wrote under the nom de plume Polly Larkin).
With the dawning of Progressive Era, women began agitating for the right to report on subjects considered the domain of male reporters. Led by a crusading woman journalist using the pen name Nellie Bly, not only did they prove that they were capable of handling a man’s job, publishers also learned that news or features written from a feminine perspective, one not merely mimicking male journalists, had market value—it sold newspapers. Historian Alice Falls calls this period the creation of a modern public space for women, where they discovered that their gender was actually working for them. In newspapers they found their voice in raising issues that weren’t being discussed.
Having spent years writing the society column for the Petaluma Courier, in 1895 Rena Shattuck started her own newspaper—the weekly Petalumian. In her first issue she announced that “no scandals, bitterness nor sensationalism “shall enter into the newspaper’s columns.” The editor of the Petaluma Courier applauded her stance as “a womanly idea.”
In 1901, Petaluma’s other newspaper, the Argus, invited Shattuck to serve as editor of a special Thanksgiving edition written entirely by members of the Ladies Improvement Club. The front page was devoted to the achievements of the club, and the inside consisted of feature stories on education, local Native Americans, civic pride, local histories, and the temperance movement.
Rena went on to serve as “Home Circle” editor of a west coast farm journal called Pacific Rural Press, and later as writer for the Associated Press. The Petaluma Courier called her “one of the best known women newspaper writers in the state.”
Bicycles
Finally, bicycles. In the 1890s, America was totally obsessed with the bicycle. There were millions of bikes on the roads, and young men like Frank Lippitt in Petaluma were starting “wheelmen” clubs to compete in races.
For women, the new technology of the bicycle became an enormous cultural and political force, as a woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend upon a man for transportation. She was free to come and go at will. The bicycle imparted a parity with men that was both new and heady. In short, more and more women came to regard it as the “freedom machine.”
“The woman on the wheel is altogether a novelty,” wrote a newspaper at the time.” She is riding to greater freedom, to a nearer equality with man, to the habit of taking care of herself, and to new views on the subject of clothes philosophy.”
Yes, clothes philosophy. One of the freedoms that bicycle riding introduced to women was a shift away from the restrictive, modest fashion of the Victorian age. Cycling required a more practical, rational form of active wear. Large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers, or baggy trousers cinched at the knee. At a time when middle class women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the novelty of sports offered an opportunity for women to rethink their clothing.
But dress reform was not a simple matter of practical adaptation; it invoked and challenged popular perceptions of femininity, and so became a hotly contested moral issue. Eventually, the clothing battle, largely fought over the popularity of cycling among younger women, forever altered public perceptions of female athleticism and proper female behavior in public.
But while the bicycle technology brought new freedoms for American women, they were still a couple of decades away from securing the national right to vote. A bicycling joke from the era captured something of the challenge ahead:
Jack and Jill have just climbed a steep hill on their tandem bicycle, with Jill riding in front. “Phew, that was a tough climb,” Jill said, leaning over, breathing hard. “The climb was so hard, and we were going so slow, I thought we were never going to make it.”
“Yeah,” said Jack, “good thing I kept the brakes on, or we would have slid all the way back down!”
The Petaluma Ladies Improvement Club continued to manage their showpieces, Walnut Park and Hill Plaza, until 1911, when they turned them over “to the tender mercies” of a new parks commission created by a city council awaken to financial value of city beautification.
By that time, few improvement projects could be found in town that didn’t have the personal touch of the club, including trees lining residential streets, cement sidewalks, the purchase of the first city ambulance, the painting of water hydrants and telephone poles, sanitation in the schools, and the nighttime illumination of the town clock at Western Avenue and Petaluma Boulevard North to mark the time for errant, barhopping husbands.
The club also raised money for the new Carnegie library at 4th and B Streets, the land for which Addie Atwater sold to the city at half its market value, and they inspired the formation of other women’s civic clubs like the Oak Hill Improvement Club, which raised the money in 1908 to create a third city park at the city’s abandoned burial ground at Oak Hill on Howard Street. By 1909, even the more staid Petaluma Woman’s Club began to engage in civic improvements.
After Addie Atwater passed away at the age in 1912 at the age of 75, the Ladies Improvement Club fell into an inactive phase until the First World War, when they regrouped one last time to raise money for the Red Cross. Their spirit of progress, however, inspired ongoing civic improvements in Petaluma in the years that followed.
The city council, however, never ceased in their efforts to convert Hill Plaza (renamed Penry Park in 2001 in honor of Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Richard Penry of Petaluma) into something useful. In 1948 and again in 1960, the city councilmen put forth proposals to turn the plaza into a parking lot, only to be stopped by public outcry.
During a city council hearing on the parking lot proposal in 1960, a doctor named L.J. Snow stood up in council chambers and, quoting the poet John Keats, delivered what many considered the turning point of the evening. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Snow said.
The Ladies Improvement Club would have been pleased.
SOURCES:
Thanks to Katherine J. Rinehart for her research assistance.
John L. Crompton, “The Role of the Proximate Principle in the Emergence of Urban Parks in the United Kingdom and in the United States,” Leisure Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, 213-234, April 2007.
Petaluma Daily Morning Courier: “Another Fountain,” March 14, 1900; “These Ladies Worked,” April 29, 1898; December 29, 1886; March 16, 1900; “D Street Plaza,” January 13, 1886; (Reducing Hill Plaza) March 3, 1886; “Once a Public Plaza, Always a Public Plaza,” December 1, 1886; “The Work Goes On,” September 15, 1886; “The Improvement Club,” July 22, 1896; “Grand Marshall Collins, May 27, 1896; “Improvement Club Meeting,” September 7, 1896; “The League Meet,” July 8, 1896.
Petaluma Weekly Argus: (D Street Plaza Deed) December 26, 1873; “Let Us Have a Park,” December 4, 1874; (Main Street Plaza Stone Wall) August 9, 1878; “Our Plazas,” January 28, 1876; “Walnuts,” January 9, 1886; “Sanity in the Schools,” December 12, 1899; “Improvement Club Historic Meeting,” May 23, 1918; “Woman’s Club,” May 17, 1963.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Petaluma Rises to Fresh Fame and Glory,” May 1, 1901; “Thanksgiving Argus Edition,” November 28, 1901; “Obituary of Rena Shattuck,” February 26, 1942; Ed Mannion, “Women Championed the Green Spot,” January 30, 1960; Ed Mannion, “Rear View Mirror” column, September 30, 1961, October 7, 1961; “Once a Sleepy River Town, Petaluma Has Grown up in 160 Years,” September 25, 2015; “The City Board,” June 10, 1896; (Palm Trees), February 28, 1900; “Hill Plaza Parking Opposed by Greenery Lovers,” January 19, 1960; “Old Building Coming Down,” December 9, 1960; Bill Soberanes: “History of the Petaluma Woman’s Club,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 26, 1986; Bill Soberanes, May 1, 1972;
“The Woman with the Hoe,” San Francisco Examiner, May 19, 1899.
“Wheelmen Race at Petaluma,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1896.
“The Plaza Question,” Sonoma County Journal, November 7, 1859.
“Rena Shattuck,” San Francisco Call, June 22, 1896.
“Sale of Petalumian,” Ukiah Daily Journal, January 22, 1897.
Adair Heig, The History of Petaluma, (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates,1982), p. 147.
Katherine Rinehart: “Controversial Plans Rocked Downtown Plaza,” Petaluma Magazine, Summer 2008; Petaluma: A History in Architecture, (Arcadia Publishing, 2005) p. 106; “Hill Plaza History Timeline,” Sonoma Country Historical Library Collection.
Marianne Hurley, Katherine Rinehart, Lucy Kortum, “Petaluma Landmarks,” Celebrating Petaluma (Petaluma Sesquentennial Committee, 2008), pp. 84-85.
Paige Meltzer, “The Pulse and Conscience of America” The General Federation and Women’s Citizenship, 1945-1960,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2009), Vol. 30 Issue 3, p52-76. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/370523
Tom Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, with Biographical Sketches (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1911), p. 720-721
John Benanti “Cypress Hill Cemetery,” Petaluma Museum Association Newsletter, Volume 23, Issue 4, Fall 2013.c
Janet Gracyk, “Walnut Park, Written Historical and Descriptive Data,” Historic Landscapes Survey, National Park Service, May 10, 2009.
https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/ca/ca3600/ca3639/data/ca3639data.pdf
Petaluma Woman’s Club Year Books, 1903, 1913-1914, 1914-1915, 1915-1916. Petaluma Historical Museum collection.
Minutes of Ladies improvement Club 1896-1900. Petaluma Historical Museum collection.
Jeanette Gibson Jones, “The Petaluma Woman’s Club,” January 27, 1914. Petaluma Historical Museum collection.
Robert A. Thompson, “Petaluma, Sonoma County,” Out West: A magazine of the Old Pacific and the New (Lost Angeles, Land of Sunshine Publishing Company, Volume 16, 1902).
Jane Cunningham Croly, The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (New York: H. G. Allen and Co., 1898).