I See by the Papers...

"Honest & Fearless," someone scrawled under a snapshot of him in the California archives, but many more were inclined to denounce him as a disgrace to the State Senate in which he served. He claimed to be speaking on behalf of the natural order intended by "God Almighty," but critics argued he was the mouthpiece for the liquor industry. He insisted he was just defending the traditional domestic roles of women; a great many saw him as a bully demanding continued discrimination against them.

State Senator J. B. Sanford (D-Ukiah) was the de facto leader of those in California opposed to women's suffrage during the years before the October, 1911 vote in the state. Every voter was mailed a pamphlet with excerpts of his "grandmother speech" which mocked suffragists and their demands for equality.

His hateful and misogynistic opinions may seem ridiculous today but in viewing history, context is everything. The passage of suffrage in California is all the more remarkable once you realized how extreme Sanford's views were, and that so many male voters agreed with him. San Francisco, Alameda, and Marin Counties all opposed giving women the right to vote, and suffrage was likewise defeated in Petaluma, Sonoma, Windsor and Healdsburg. It won in Santa Rosa by 14 points, which gave it the boost to pass in Sonoma county overall by four percent. See "THE SUMMER WHEN WOMEN WON THE VOTE" for more background.

As part of the Petaluma Library & Museum suffrage centennial exhibit, we put together a "pseudo-radio play" that imagines a 1911 interview with Sanford. In it he reads a portion of that infamous speech and has a short debate with Frances McG. Martin, the eloquent President of the Santa Rosa Political Equality Club who frequently jousted with Sanford on the editorial pages of the Santa Rosa Republican. In the production almost all of Sanford's remarks and most of Martin's are drawn directly from original sources.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott