Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California, 1915-1920

Abstract

tally changed the status of their citizenship. Over the next few years women reformers searched for ways to further transform their citizenship. They wanted to go beyond enfranchisement and acquire more political power, thereby enhancing both their membership and their position within the American polity. They sought to gain political equity in their state by influencing public policy, with their first serious attempt to do so occurring in 1913 in a campaign focusing on sexual mores. In that campaign they won legal and political victories, but not equality. Two years later in 1915 California women enthusiastically entered a different effort to redefine the meaning of U.S. citizenship, the Americanization movement, an aggressive attempt by businessmen, patriotic groups, settlement workers, and educators to acculturate immigrants. This essay seeks to ascertain why these suffragists, mostly native-born and middle-class white Protestants, turned to Americanization with such enthusiasm.1