L. A.’s Unheralded Pioneer Women : Historians Document Their Contributions, Influences

In 1911, California women won the right to vote, and 91-year-old Caroline Severance was escorted “in a queenly procession” to the Los Angeles office of the Registrar of Voters, where she became the city’s first registered woman voter.

Harriet Russell Strong, the first woman admitted to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, came up with a proposal to use Colorado River water to irrigate part of the desert land in the southeastern part of California in 1917. The concept was pursued and incorporated in the 1928 Swing-Johnson bill, which provided for the Colorado River development.

Carlotta Bass, editor of the California Eagle and president of the local United Negro Improvement Assn., formed the Pacific Coast Negro Improvement Assn. and joined middle-class blacks and whites in the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Aviation’s formative years in Southern California had turned into a golden age. Radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson is reported to have “donned a leather cap with goggles” and scattered leaflets from high above the city of San Diego. And young Amelia Earhart practiced her “touch and go’s” in a field of wild mustard flowers where the May Co. Wilshire stands today.

Information reported in

“California Women: A History” In lavish, luminous Los Angeles, self-made city, land of unfettered beauty, women were soaring into a new age.

Many of the significant contributions and influences of women in the development of the West have been documented by Joan Jensen, a professor of history at New Mexico University, and Gloria R. Lothrop, a history professor at Cal State Polytechnic University Pomona. Their research has yielded “California Women: A History” (Boyd & Fraser Publishing, San Francisco).

Jensen remembers well the days she spent growing up in the San Gabriel Valley. She lived near the old San Gabriel Mission, and for years, toured the grounds, learning about the ancient Gabrielino Indians, their acorn harvests, spirit worlds and violent clashes with the Spanish missionaries.

The more she delved into California’s past, the more she became convinced that women had been underplayed in the birth of Los Angeles, and particularly the San Gabriel Valley.

In the late 1970s, she came across the words to back up her position: one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the life of Eulalia Arrila de Perez, who was llavera, keeper of the keys, at the San Gabriel Mission from 1821 to 1835.

De Perez’ proud words, taken down longhand by an oral historian in 1877, echoed through a century of forgotten history.

“She told her story (at age 97) to Thomas Savage, saying, ‘It was I, with my daughters, who made the chocolate, the oil, the candy, the lemonade,’ ” Jensen said. “ ‘I made so much lemonade that some of it was even bottled and sent to Spain.’ There’s a strong sense of pride and recognition in those words about her own abilities.”

The San Gabriel Valley was the cradle of Los Angeles’ birth and home to a great many prominent Hispanic and Native American women centuries before the city’s founding 206 years ago.

Women’s contributions to the growth and development of the West have long been ignored or simply lost in the annals of time, according to the Jensen-Lothrop book.

“We’re creating a new kind of written history but the documents we’re finding have been there all along,” said Jensen, who has studied and taught 20th-Century U. S. history and women’s history for nearly 25 years. “When other historians reworked that material, they tended to take gender out of it . . . so that women’s accounts became homogenized and deconstructed.”

“Many of the early Western historians were male writers,” Lothrop said. “They wrote about what they knew and what they considered important from their frame of reference. They also went to the most accessible records, using treaties of war, business records, court proceedings and legislative proceedings . . . according to early accounts, women seemed to be invisible.”

For instance, by 1890 more than 900,000 women lived west of the Mississippi River, she said, yet no more than a dozen have ever been catalogued. In other instances, women’s letters and diaries were buried in collections indexed under a man’s name.

“The shady ladies of the West,” Lothrop said, “the outlaws and quick shooters were the only women who gained enough notoriety to be indexed.

“Those were the women given individuality in the traditional treatment of the American West,” she said. “If you examine them in more depth, you’ll see that they’re all women who on the one hand were unique but who also excelled within male parameters.”

Lothrop, who teaches the history of the American West and California and the history of European minorities and women, said she has reconstructed the more realistic story of Los Angeles women from a wide array of materials, “ . . . from women’s crafts and cookbooks, their faded letters, tombstones and forgotten mementos in old family Bibles. Indeed, this kind of history is probably lurking in everyone’s attics.”

The recent (Sept. 4) commemoration of Los Angeles’ birth 206 years ago harkens back to the women who once inhabited the sleepy, sun-baked cattle town founded on the west bank of a river flowing through the Los Angeles Basin.

Christened El Pueblo in 1781, Los Angeles was blessed with ideal geography, mild weather and a rich blend of indigenous Mexican, Spanish and Native American traditions.

“Indian women were central to California culture,” Jensen said, and an important dimension of Los Angeles today. About 75,000 Indians live in the city, she said, making Los Angeles the center of “probably the largest Indian population next to the Navajo nation.”

“We tend to forget that women are frequently the cultural links,” she said. “That they not only kept families together but also handed on from one generation to another not just intangibles but also their material possessions.”

In many California Indian groups, women were the acorn gatherers, Jensen said. “Acorns were the staple because California Indians did not develop a regular agriculture. Their roles as food producers were really crucial . . . in a sense the economic base of a great many of the groups.”

Some Were Landowners

Native American women were also landowners. Some instrumental in Southern California’s history managed to hold land through the end of the 19th Century, a time of bloody upheaval among warring Indian, Spanish and European settlers.

“Maria Juana de Los Angeles received the 2,000-acre Rancho Cuca near San Diego in 1845,” Jensen said. A Fernandeno Indian woman named Espiritu was one of three landowners of Rancho El Escorpion at the Western edge of today’s San Fernando Valley.

Indian women began to intermarry with the Spaniards and convert to Christianity, Jensen said, but relatively few raised their children as Latinos.

Migrant Native Americans from other parts of the country also began arriving, and, unlike their rural counterparts, adopted life styles influenced by European settlers engaged in overseas trade.

Few records were left by Hispanic women who began entering California in the late 18th Century, Jensen said, but some of those later employed at the missions became landowners and heads of extended households.

Under Spanish law, California women were accorded many more rights than their Anglo counterparts, Lothrop explained. Community property laws of the day entitled widows to half of their husbands’ land. During those turbulent times, many young widows became the heirs to large portions of Southern California.

“One handwritten manuscript in the Bancroft Library (at UC Berkeley) tells of several women who rose to positions of importance at Mission San Gabriel,” said Lothrop.

Perez, for instance, was one of 66 women in Southern California to receive rancho lands, she reported. Perez was awarded Rancho San Pasqual “in return for her faithful service as partera, or overseer of supplies.”

“There was a wealthy group of (Latino) settlers and we tend to forget how important they were in terms of the arriving Anglo culture,” Jensen added.

When Capt. William Heath Davis arrived and met Dona Vicente Sepulveda, twice widowed and mother of 12 children, he found her to be a good manager and merchant, authors of the book report.

Dona Vicentia Sepulveda ran her rancho for nearly 35 years, while Maria Rita Valdez de Villa owned Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, what is today Beverly Hills, Lothrop said.

Another prominent but little-known landowner was Biddy Mason, an enslaved black woman who arrived in Los Angeles in 1850, Jensen said.

Because slavery was illegal in California, Jensen said, Mason sued her Mormon masters and won her freedom six years later. She squirreled her earnings as a midwife until she was able to invest in land. By 1898, at the close of Los Angeles’ real estate boom, “she had a $300,000 estate,” Lothrop said.

During Los Angeles’ first 100 years, women were excluded from politics and development of policy, Lothrop explained, but in the second century of the city, they spoke out through clubs and church groups.

Among the outspoken, she said, was “visionary” Caroline Severance, a pioneer of California’s kindergarten movement and founder of the Friday Morning Club and the International Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Before arriving in Los Angeles from Boston in 1875, “she had been at the forefront of the national reform movement (in New England) and an early supporter of women’s suffrage.

“Severance believed that all things were possible for women if they organized,” Lothrop said, “and charter members of the Friday Morning Club became L. A.’s city-builders.”

Severance mobilized early conservation efforts, helped establish a mental health clinic and championed early efforts to build separate juvenile hall facilities.

She had the honor of becoming Los Angeles’ first registered woman voter, Lothrop reported, and upon that occasion said: “We have come to the dawn of a glorious tomorrow. A tomorrow when the men and the women of this nation will be equal.”

In the early part of the 20th Century, Harriet Russell Strong played a significant role in overcoming the water problems of the arid desert fringes of old Los Angeles. And other women made major strides in development of Los Angeles’ culture and life style.

Charlotta Bass is recalled in the Jensen-Lothrop book as a black woman who addressed the problems of job segregation. And Tarea Hall Pittman, another outspoken black woman, nursed a grass-roots movement to implement a Fair Employment Practices Act into a statewide effort.

These were the women, often unheralded or forgotten in their relentless battles to bring culture, crafts, “chocolate and lemonade,” song and dance to the western fringes of California.