Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker
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Indiana Law Journal Volume 66 Issue 4 Article 1 Fall 1991 Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker Barbara Allen Babcock Stanford University Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj Part of the Law and Gender Commons, and the Legal Biography Commons Recommended Citation Babcock, Barbara Allen (1991) "Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 66 : Iss. 4 , Article 1. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol66/iss4/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School Journals at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Indiana Law Journal by an authorized editor of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker BARBARA ALLEN BABCOCK* INTRODUCTION: THE PERSONAL IS HIsToIuCAL "Each life helps to make up the sum of all history. ") J.J. Ayers, Delegate to the California Constitutional Convention of 1879 In 1971, I left my Distrct of Columbia public defender's job once a week and flew to New Haven to teach a seminar called "Women and the Law " The switch m cities seemed minor compared to the shift in causes. Perhaps the sharp transition helped fix memory, because, twenty years later, I recall that on one of those short flights I read Sail'er Inn v. Kirby when it was a bold new case. An early triumph of the renewed women's rights movement, the decision struck down a law that prohibited most women from bartending. The California Supreme Court called for heightened scrutiny of gender clas- sifications under the federal equal protection clause. But it relied as well on a provision from the 1879 California Constitution: No person shall on account of sex be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation, or profession.2 * Ernest W McFarland Professor of Law, Stanford University; LL.B., 1963, Yale University; A.B., 1960, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Babcock spoke on Clara Shor- tndge Foltz as constitution-maker at the Hams lecture in October 1990 at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington. A bequest from the Dorothy Redwine Estate made possible research assistance from an extraordinary group of Stanford students over the past four years. I thank them not only for their creativity and thoroughness, but for their countless hours of reading microfilmed 19th century newspapers. We would never have found the secret of the sex-discrimination clauses without this demanding labor: Judith Carrithers, Lucy Carter, Mary Erickson, Ilana Hollenberg, Linden Joesting, Lisa Lindalef, Catherine Ruckelshaus, Frances Scibelli, Paula Solano and Michael Subit. Other lknds of equally immeasurable contributions for which I am deeply grateful: Barbara Adams organized and computerized the newspaper files, while keeping the rest of my academic life in order; Jill Knuth uncovered many idden trails through genealogical research. The staff of the Stanford Law Library offered help beyond my most extravagant requests. The Stanford Biographer's Seminar continues to support and inspire and offered valuable comments on the introduction to this piece. I gave versions of the introduction and overview to the American Society for Legal History in October 1988, to the Law and Society Meeting in June 1989, and at a Hastings symposium entitled "From Gold Dust to Silicon Chips: The Califorma Constitution in Transition" in March 1989, and received useful suggestions on each occasion. Thanks, finally, to Philip Ethington for is help in understanding this era in California history and his interest in exploring women's roles-and to Thomas Grey for keeping me honest. [Eds. note-A note on documentation for this article appears on page 911; endnotes begin on page 913.] INDIANA LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 66:849 I remember that the presence of the old clause in the new case irritated me because it made the ground-breaking equal protection discussion largely su- perfluous. And, as I told my class, the clause itself was no doubt a sport, not likely to be replicated in other state constitutions. Within a year of Sail'er Inn, the women's movement swept me into full- time teaching as the first woman on the regular faculty at Stanford Law School. Upon arriving in California, I asked some of the people involved in the case about the old constitutional section, but they knew nothing of its origins. Many years and cases passed: SaiI'er Inn went from flagship to footnote case while our nascent field of "women and the law" evolved into sex discrimination, gender bias and feminist theory More women than ever before came as students to law school (1970: 8.6%; 1990: 420o) necessitating the appointment of additional women to law faculties (1970: 30o; 1990: 24%). These changes relieved me, I felt, from front-line action, so while maintaining loyalty to the women's movement I turned to writing and teaching based in the criminal defense practice that had been my other cause back in 1971.1 Then, a few years ago, by chance or fate, I learned that it was a woman who had first conceived and promoted the idea of a public defender for indigents accused of crime. Tis was the "Portia of the Pacific," Clara Shortndge Foltz (1849-1934), who in 1878 had become the first woman lawyer in California and one of the first in the country. Over a long career, she had many causes; among these public defending was important and women's rights, central. Drawn by this intersection of my own disparate interests with another life, I decided to write Clara Foltz's biography But early on, I found that the biographer's chief instrument, the subject's own papers, had been lost or destroyed. One of the few surviving primary sources is a fragmentary memoir, entitled "Struggles and Triumphs of a Woman Lawyer," that appeared in a magazine Foltz published between 1916 and 1918. Reading through one of its installments, I was struck by a reference to the constitutional equal employment section I had first seen in SaWer Inn: it was, she said, "Proposed by the writer"14 Initially this seemed a biographer's epiphany: the unsought answer to my long-forgotten question about how a modem women's rights section had appeared in the 1879 California Constitution. Like most biographers' epiph- ames, though, this was more Delphic than revelatory How did Clara Foltz "propose" the section? To whom? When? Why? There are no Foltz papers to supply the answers, nor has anyone else written on the subject. Setting yet another puzzle, Foltz also took credit for a section guaranteeing women access to education in all departments of the Umversity of California, and called it a companion measure, though it appeared much earlier in the Constitution.' The annotations to these two sections showed their slight use in what seemed small matters. Sail'er Inn was the only modem case of any significance. Yet, 1991] CLARA SHORTRIDGE FOLTZ as a biographer, I could not easily dismiss what Clara Foltz said: to her, the provisions were the "first streak of dawn" guiding woman into "larger fields of opportunity." I wondered whether their apparent insignificance in history 6 might be one more instance of the failure to take women's clais seriously. Reflecting, I realized that the two sections were actually the first guarantee of equal rights for women m the public arena ever to appear m any American constitution. In this sense, they were indeed the milestones that Foltz thought them: woman's "relation to the body politic" had changed from the "very hour of their adoption." In today's idiom, she might say that, with the passage of these sections, gender took its place beside class and race, the other great national divisions, in the American constitutional discourse.7 Thus, having defined an historical mission which could fortify my biogra- pher's curiosity, I turned to the context that produced the unprecedented constitutional sections: California in the 1870s. It was a decade of crop, bank and moral failures; of unemployed workingmen, despised Asians, silver kings and railroad barons all on the edge of class and race war, fueled by an unrestrained press and flamboyantly manipulative politicians. By the end of the decade even Karl Marx was moved to say of California: "nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist concentration taken place with such speed."8 In a situation ideal for the rise of a demagogue, Dems Kearney, an Irish drayman, formed the Workingmen's Party of California ("WPC"). Kearney joined denunciations of corporate privilege with rabid rhetoric directed against the Chinese, who had been brought to the state m large numbers to build the railroads and remained as racially despised competition for low-paying jobs. On the sandlots m front of city hall, Kearney spoke to thousands of unem- ployed men and marched at their head to build bonfires before the mansions of San Francisco's Nob Hill. In September 1877, the same month that Kearney founded the WPC, Californians voted to call a constitutional convention empowered to reform their organic law. With the election of Convention delegates approaching m June, the threat posed by Kearney's Workingmen drove the Democrats and Republicans into a coalition calling itself "the Non-Partisans." Despite this novel and desperate fusion of the major parties, the Workingmen still captured one-third of the delegates statewide and all of the seats from San Francisco. In late September 1878, the Constitutional Convention assembled in Sacra- mento. There it would stew and wrangle for nearly half a year, debating every issue of the day and finally producing a document said at the time to be the world's longest written constitution.