Gendered Politics: Campaign Strategies of California Women Candidates, 1912–1970

Abstract

In June 1998 the Los Angeles Times reported that Leona Egeland was the first woman elected to California's state assembly. Evelyn Hughes Maslac challenged that statement, noting that her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hughes, had been elected to the assembly in 1918. This gaffe in chronology illustrates the central message of Gendered Politics. From 1912 to 1970 over five hundred women campaigned elective office in California, some successfully, yet few beyond their families remember their names. Linda Van Ingen corrects this “recurring historical amnesia” with a detailed study of California women's efforts to gain and hold elected office (p. xv). Ingen picks up where Linda Witt, Karen M. Paget, and Glenna Matthews's Running as a Woman: Gender and Power in American Politics (1995) leaves off. She details individual women's determined assault on electoral politics by documenting fifty-eight years of California primary races. Ingen supplements these records with newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, promotional materials, and candidates' financial statements.