The Suffrage Soldiers Are Still Among Us

Here’s a pop quiz on women’s suffrage which might turn your morning coffee bitter:

Which nation first gave women the right to vote?

If you said the United States, you missed it by 27 years. It was New Zealand in 1893; we didn’t gain such civility until 1920, when we ratified the 19th Amendment.

More to make you bristle:

The colony of New Jersey in 1790 granted voting rights to “all free inhabitants” but later reneged when the men realized women expected that to mean them too.

In 1875, Michigan and Minnesota gave women the right to vote--but only in school elections.

California’s track record?

In 1893 the state Legislature passed a women’s suffrage bill, but it was vetoed by the governor. Suffragists got the issue on the ballot in 1896; the voters (the men) shot it down in big numbers.

The Times library staff provided me many stories from that period. Clearly, the driving force behind eventual constitutional ratification was the National American Woman Suffrage Assn. You may know it better by its present name:

The League of Women Voters.

I looked up these dour moments in our history because the local chapter of the League of Women Voters will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the 19th Amendment Saturday at the Atrium Hotel in Irvine. It has chosen to honor four local women of achievement for the occasion.

Among them is Shirley Grindle, widely respected as the county’s top political watchdog on issues like ethics and campaign financing. She chuckled when I asked her to picture living in an era where she couldn’t vote.

“I would have been shot,” she quipped. “I’d like to think I’d have been one of those women at the front lines, going to jail, fighting for the vote. But those were women of tremendous courage.”

It’s fitting that Grindle’s mother, Dona Grindle, now 84, will be there to see her daughter honored. She would have been a child when women got voting rights. Shirley Grindle remembers that her grandmother was a quiet, dutiful Nebraska farmer’s wife raising a family. But when she got the right to vote, she jumped at the chance.

The emcee for this event will be Judy B. Rosener, professor at UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management and a leading activist on women’s issues. I called her to discuss the 19th Amendment, but Rosener had something else she wanted to talk about--how it’s a shame that more people don’t know the League of Women Voters’ significant history in this county.

“The league changed my whole life and that of many other women here,” Rosener said. “I was a housewife of the ‘50s who expected my husband to support me.”

A Political Awakening

Rosener attended a league meeting in the early 1960s, she said, and discovered a whole new world of political involvement. It led her to return to school for post graduate degrees and a life as a politically active college professor.

“In those days, we in the league would brown-bag lunch at each other’s homes. These women cared so deeply about the political process, they’d meet anywhere.”

Another of the four to be honored Saturday is Lee Podolak, who’s been active here on dozens of issues, ranging from the environment to housing and the homeless. Podolak points out that most people are unaware it was the League of Women Voters that led the way in changing the U.S. Constitution.

Rosener and Podolak share a similar concern that fewer new faces are coming along in the league to help carry the load. Connie Haddad, former chapter president who is putting Saturday’s event together, reluctantly agrees.

“We still have 600 members, which I think is pretty good,” she said. “But it’s true most of the work often goes to those who have been around the longest.”

They all agree that younger women are working at careers besides raising families and have other outlets for their creative energies. But the league needs a public relations boost.

“We need the next generation to know what the league has meant for this area,” Podolak said.

Also to be honored are Rose Espinoza, who gained national attention for starting an after-school tutoring program in her garage, and Sarah Catz, the first woman to chair the Orange County Transportation Authority.

The centerpiece of Saturday’s event, however, will be the 19th Amendment. Maybe we ought to keep in mind the things that ratification did not do, according to stories of that period:

* In some states, women still could not hold major public offices or sit on juries.

* A woman lost her right to vote in some states if she married an immigrant; a man did not.

* Under civil service laws, men were allowed to be promoted above women, even if women stood ahead of them on performance lists.

By the way, if you want to know which California governor deserves your wrath for vetoing a woman’s right to vote, it was Henry H. Markham, a Republican. But he was an equal opportunity offender. In his inaugural address, he vowed to keep the Chinese out of California because “the influx of these people is very great.”

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 966-7789 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com