“Miss Selina Solomons, interesting suffragette.”
That was the headline of a short article by Pauline Hess that ran in this publication in 1910. It told of a powerhouse political activist, a writer, a feminist and a member of a fascinating San Francisco Jewish family.
“Miss Selina Solomons, who has been an important factor in organizing and promoting suffrage clubs in this city, is arousing much enthusiasm in the equal rights movement, especially among the wage earners, where her helpful influence is being felt,” Hess wrote. “New suffrage quarters have recently been opened on Post Street, where the business women may enjoy a light luncheon and also become enlightened regarding the principles of the cause.”
Solomons was one of the founders of the “Votes for Women Club” and an important figure in the fight to secure voting rights for women in California.
She had a strong role model in her mother, Hannah Solomons.
“Few there are in this or any other community who have lived such a complete and well spent life as did Hannah Solomons, a noble example to our coming generation,” we wrote in her 1909 obituary.
The German-born Hannah nee Marks came to California for a marriage that didn’t end up happening and moved in with her brother, Bernard Marks, who started as a gold prospector and ended up as an important developer in Fresno. Hannah became a teacher and eventually the “youngest and the only woman principal in San Francisco at that period.”
“In 1888, when the question of placing women on the Board of Education was first agitated, the campaign was put in the hands of three women, representing the three religious elements in the community, and she was selected as representative of the Jewish people,” the obituary said.
In 1862 Marks married Seixas Solomons, a macher, or VIP, in the San Francisco Jewish community and the grandson of Gershom Mendes Seixas, who attended George Washington’s inauguration.
Their daughter Selina Solomons had dedicated herself to the women’s suffrage movement for years when — in 1911 — an amendment to allow women to vote made it onto the state ballot. This wasn’t the first time that California women had organized; they’d already faced defeat in 1896. But now as other states introduced women’s suffrage, California women thought the time may finally be right.
Solomons’ club on Post Street was focused on spreading the idea of suffrage to women outside the affluent leisure class. According to a 2007 history in SFGate, the club offered a reasonably priced lunch to shop girls and office workers, who could learn about women’s rights while eating four kinds of soup (oxtail, tomato bisque, chicken and clam chowder) and five kinds of salads, as well as fried sand dab, creamed codfish, homemade cakes and “rich milk.”
The club was a success. And the suffrage movement, fueled by soup and sand dab, was growing. But as Solomons recounted in a later book about the campaign, winning people over was not always easy.
“The butcher with whom I had been dealing roared like a mad bull at sight of my [women’s suffrage] badge — a yellow, not a red flag! ‘If my wife wanted to vote, I’d kick her out of the house,’ he declared,” the book states. “‘A man of your sort will never know what his wife is thinking,’ I replied, as calmly as I could to this outburst. ‘But I will tell you what I am thinking; that is, that you are the partner who should be kicked out.’”
In 1936, we ran this reminiscence from one Mrs. Louis Van Vliet about those earlier decades.
“In the early days of woman’s suffrage, a small group of women, under the leadership of Miss Selina Solomons, banded together and formed the first suffrage club. Upon being asked to join, I consulted my mother. ‘You may join,’ she responded, ‘for I think that since many women are doing men’s work in the world, it is only just that they should have the same privileges. However,’ she continued, ‘don’t mention it, as people would say you are getting bold, and unwomanly in your wish to vote.’”
The idea that voting was unfeminine was a common one.
“The modern woman, as a rule, is bold, self-assertive and lacks real femininity,” wrote Bertha Kramer Michael in these pages in September 1911 on the topic of suffrage, only a few weeks before the vote. “It is to be hoped that sanity and well-balanced judgment of man will decide the woman question once and for all.”
It did, and in favor of women — albeit just barely.
According to the California Secretary of State, the final suffrage tally on Election Day on Oct. 11, 1911, was 125,037 to 121,450, a difference of 3,587 votes. This made California the sixth state where women could vote, almost a decade before the 19th Amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, and finally gave women across the country the right to the ballot.
Solomons rejoiced in 1911. But, she said in her book, she celebrated even more at the next election in May 1912, when she signed up to serve as a ballot worker. Now, women could finally do the very thing for which she’d been fighting for so long.
“Of all these great days for the new woman citizen,” she wrote, “the greatest, according to the local press, was May 14th, because then occurred the first presidential primary in the state, and the first opportunity for its women to participate in national politics.”
As we near the end of Women’s History Month, it is an honor to acknowledge Solomons and all the women who dedicated their lives to correcting one of the many mistakes made at our nation’s founding.