San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Making their mark in local government
Union-tribune’s Phenomenal Women project — showcased throughout 2020 on the cover of the Sunday paper — is a celebration of a century of female achievement in San Diego. The U-T launched it this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States.
The project is organized by fields of achievement. Medicine, which kicked off the project in April, featured physician and suffragette Charlotte Baker. Science, in May, featured Sally Ride. In June, women representing two generations of social and political advocacy in San Diego were featured — Rachel Ortiz, Dr. Shirley Weber and Geneviéve Joneswright. In August, we featured women in the field of sports, spotlighting Audrey “Mickey” Patterson-tyler, a legend in track and field. And in September, we honored women in the arts, featuring author Pam Munoz Ryan.
This month, we recognize women who have served in elected office, including a list of every woman who has represented the people of the San Diego region as a city council member, mayor, county supervisor, member of the state Legislature or member of Congress.
An accompanying story on the front page of today’s paper takes a look at 100 years of women in local politics — as officeholders and as voters.
Here, staff writer Morgan Cook, who wrote the front-page story, and researcher Merrie Monteagudo, who compiled the comprehensive list, discuss this month’s installment of the project.
Q: Morgan, how did you approach your story on women in San Diego politics? What were you hoping to discover?
A: I was hoping to give readers point-in-time snapshots of women in top governing bodies for the county and the cities that were incorporated at each point in time. I chose the years sort of arbitrarily. Even though women had the right to vote in California in 1911, I wanted to start after the 19th Amendment in 1920, with a few years to allow some time for women voters to build momentum.
I then chose 1970 because it was 50 years after women got the right to vote nationwide. A halfway point, if you will. We couldn’t determine if the years were representative of eras because county data on women in office didn’t exist.
We had to reconstruct who was sitting on local governing bodies in 1970 and 1924 by piecing together the information from old government records and newspaper clips.
Q: Did you learn anything that was particularly surprising?
A:. Most definitely! I had no idea women were listed on the ballot as “Mrs.” when men were not listed as “Mr.” It seemed odd that marital status was apparently important to people when it came to female candidates, but on further reflection, it jibes with culture at the time.
Q: People often refer to 1992 as the “Year of the Woman” because of the then-historic number of women elected to Congress. Has there been a similar “Year of the Woman” in San Diego politics?
A: Yes, 2018 was considered a big year for women in politics because there were a record number running for office nationwide.
In San Diego County, women candidates made history by getthe ting a majority on San Diego City Council for the first time.
Q: Merrie, how did you go about compiling the list of elected leaders? And how did you decide whom to include? A:
I started with official published sources including the California Roster, the directory of public officials published annually by the San Diego Registrar of Voters, local government websites and decades of “How to reach your representatives” lists published in the Union-tribune archives.
Next, I emailed questions to the offices of every city clerk in the county, the clerk of the Board of Supervisors, the chief clerk of the California State Assembly and the Secretary of the State Senate, as well as a few local historians.
We were all hampered by not being able to physically access some records due to the pandemic, but almost everyone answered with lists and suggestions of where find more information.
I put everything in a spreadsheet and cross-referenced names with independent research to verify gender and other details. Government directories generally don’t say if an officeholder was a male or female, so I made some general assumptions based on first names and double-checked every Pat, Gail and Beverly — as well as officeholders identified only by initials — in old newspaper stories. I ran a lot of searches in digital archives and read a lot of obituaries.
I decided early on that I could not include all the women on city boards and commissions because there have been so many of them. And because it is difficult to find a comprehensive source for those records.
Q: What were some of the most surprising or intriguing things you learned in the course of your research?
A: I learned that women were elected to public office in San Diego County long before they were able to vote. Flora Kimball was elected to the National City School Board in 1889, more than three decades before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granted women in the United States the right to vote.
On the other hand, I was shocked to realize that the phrase, “first woman to serve as …” was still being used a century later in the 1980s.