The Plains Truth About Some Pioneers of Women’s Lib

Pauline Chavez Bent complains that my recent column on women who pioneered the West failed to mention Latinas.

True, my piece was based on “The Female Frontier,” by Glenda Riley, a study of women who pioneered the Great Plains and the prairie--territories that did not include Arizona, New Mexico and California.

Chavez Bent traces her roots to the Europeans of the Onate expedition, which settled in what is now New Mexico 22 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. (Thirty-three percent were mestizos--a blend of Spanish and Indian.)

In 1660, she says, a woman named Isabel petitioned the mayor of Queretaro (New Spain) for an affidavit stating that she was a free woman, not bound by marriage or slavery, the legitimate daughter of a black named Hernando and an Indian named Madalena. She asked the affidavit to protect her from mistreatment on the second Onate expedition to New Mexico. The affidavit was granted.

“So in 1660,” she says, “the seed was planted for women’s lib way out in Queretaro. I love it.”

In “California Women: A History,” Joan M. Jensen and Gloria Ricci Lathrop note that California’s first women were Indians, followed by Hispanic Californians, then by Mexicans and finally (after the American conquest) by Euro-American women from the East and, in the late 19th Century, small numbers of blacks and Asians.

But my interest is in women of the Western myth, as depicted in Western movies, who came across the continent or around the Horn. Are they merely creations of the legend, like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy?

Like plainswomen, California women were bound by old sexual divisions of labor, but the California frontier allowed women some freedoms. They often wore men’s pants and many took advantage of liberal divorce laws; but child support and alimony were almost unknown.

Pasadena became not only a haven for the ailing but also a hotbed of women’s rights thinking. Los Angeles women organized a Women’s Christian Temperance Union and campaigned for women’s suffrage, but men defeated a suffrage amendment in 1896.

Women were expected to maintain the home, not disport themselves in public, and refrain from passion or sensuality, restraints from which the modern California woman is happily liberated.

Although many women found work outside the home, few were admitted to financial and professional life. In 1890, Los Angeles had 27 women doctors, but no women lawyers. As on the Plains, most women found work as teachers or librarians.

Today’s 100,000 California women lawyers must doff their caps to Clara Shortridge Foltz, a 27-year-old divorced mother of five. Barred from practicing law by the California code, Foltz drafted a law eliminating discrimination for sex or race, and lobbied for its passage. She wrote in her autobiography:

“The bill met with a storm of opposition such as had never been witnessed upon the floor of a California Senate. Narrow gauge statesmen grew as red as turkey gobblers mouthing their ignorance against the bill, and staid old grangers who had never seen the inside of a courthouse seemed to have been given the gift of tongues and then delivered themselves of maiden speeches eloquent with nonsense.”

In 1878, the bill passed by two votes but was doomed to die if the governor did not sign it before midnight on the last day. Foltz invaded the governor’s office and persuaded him to sign.

But when Foltz tried to enter University of California’s Hastings Law School, the young men jeered and mocked her. When the school denied her admission, she sued. The college argued its right to exclude persons whose presence would be “useless to such persons themselves, or detrimental to said college, or likely to impair or interfere with the proper discipline and instruction of the students.”

The school’s attorney complimented Foltz on her grace and beauty and observed that women lawyers were dangerous to justice because “an impartial jury would be impossible when a lovely lady pleaded the case of the criminal.”

The judge ruled against the school. Foltz became the state’s first woman lawyer.

These urban trials seem far removed from the hardship of the Plains, but life was not easy on the California frontier. The washtub, the water pump and the cook stove were the centers of most women’s lives. The California beach girl had yet to emerge.

Jensen and Lothrop conclude: “Out of the chaos of this mixing of peoples (Indian, Hispanic, Euro-American) came a multicultured heritage that survived into the 20th Century. It provided a variety of traditions upon which women could draw as they struggled for survival and identity in a society dominated by white American males.”

They did at least as much to tame the West as John Wayne.