“In Relation to the Rights of Suffrage”: The 1911 Amendment for Women’s Voting Rights in California

California’s first Constitutional Convention was held in Monterey in 1849. The original constitution, published in both English and Spanish the same year, was written by 48 delegates on nineteen pages of parchment. Article II, The Right to Suffrage stipulates that only white males have the right to suffrage.

The exclusion of women from Article II would lead to a decades-long fight for the right to vote in California. The following documents serve as just a few examples of the strategies that women’s suffrage proponents in the state employed to advocate for the right to vote prior to the passage of the 1911 amendment.