Artists and Designers Party for Suffrage
By: Anne T. Kent California Room
Tags: Voting Rights, Marin County, Suffrage Movement, California, Womens Suffrage

by Marilyn L. Geary

The Girl Blacksmith. San Francisco Call, April 28, 1907

The late summer and early fall of 1911 saw Marin suffragists gearing up for Proposition 4, the California constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote. They held numerous gatherings-card parties, teas and open-air meetings-to raise money for campaigns to promote women’s suffrage. With no vote in the matter, they could only inform and convince their male counterparts to decide in their favor.

Lillian McNeill Palmer. © Heritage Society of Pacific Grove.

Several artists and designers who had built successful careers combining art with business played major roles in these events. Against enormous odds, these women had managed to break into the male world of commerce. One of them, Lillian McNeill Palmer, known as the “artistic girl blacksmith,” had become renowned as a fine metalworker. She owned the Palmer Copper Shop on San Francisco’s Sutter Street where she created lighting fixtures in the California Craftsman style. Her exquisite work in brass and copper had garnered widespread national acclaim. The San Francisco Call noted that Palmer was “a clever and original worker in metals, and one whose work is attracting even more attention in the East than here.”

On September 1, Palmer spoke at an open-air suffrage meeting at the dance platform on Miller Avenue across from the depot in Mill Valley. Organized by the Outdoor Art Club, this gathering on September 1 was, according to the Mill Valley Record, “the first move of the local suffragists to win the men of Mill Valley to their side.” Many of the suffragists in Marin, society women and wives of prominent businessmen, never had the need, nor the opportunity, to enter the workforce. Palmer’s experience in the business world gave her a unique perspective on the value the vote could bring women. At the Mill Valley gathering, Palmer announced that she was a working woman and knew what wage-earners would gain with women’s right to vote. She stated, “It isn’t because women do not know how to vote, but because they DO KNOW HOW that certain interests wish to debase them from the right to do so.”

Emily Williams, architect. © Heritage Society of Pacific Grove

Palmer’s life-long partner, Emily Eolian Williams, shared Palmer’s views on equal rights for women. Unable to find a job as an architectural draftsman in almost exclusively male profession, Williams started her own architectural firm, becoming one of the first female architects in Northern California, designing homes in San Jose, Pacific Grove, San Francisco, and Los Gatos. She also designed an exhibition booth at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition for the Alaska Garnet Mining and Manufacturing Company, a firmed owned and managed by twelve women from St. Paul, Minnesota. Palmer created the lighting fixtures for the booth and also showed her own metal work at the PPIE.

Palmer and Williams belonged to the California Arts and Crafts Movement and formed part of an informal network of architects and artists that included Julia Morgan and Dick Van Erp. They were friends with Lillian O’Hara and Grace Livermore (unrelated to Marin conservationist Caroline Livermore). This couple partnered in the successful interior design firm of the O’Hara and Livermore Studio of Applied Art, with locations in Santa Barbara and San Francisco. In 1905, Livermore and O’Hara purchased several lots in San Anselmo’s Barber Tract. There they built a number of bungalows, one which served as their second home, the others as guest homes for friends.

When the College Equal Suffrage League determined to hold a fundraiser for the suffrage cause, members O’Hara and Livermore offered their country place as the site for a garden party. They called on their colleagues, other women in the interior design field, to assist in creating an attractive setting for the event. The Mill Valley Record opined that “The bungalow and grounds belonging to the two artists are well worth seeing in themselves, but on this occasion they will be decorated as never before, by a corps of artists and decorators, famous throughout California.” Miss Charlotte Williams and Mrs. Mary Bates McLellan, two of the main designers, had “converted the grounds into a veritable garden of Eden.”

On September 7, “a big four-horse bus, decorated in the yellow suffrage color” took women of the Mill Valley Equal Franchise League to the party at O’Hara and Livermore’s in San Anselmo. What today is a twenty-minute drive in moderate traffic was, back then, a major outing. For a fifty-cent ticket, the proceeds going to suffrage, attendees could admire “rare draperies and objects d’arts” from the San Francisco shop of the Misses O’Hara and Livermore. Lillian Palmer donated a brass lamp as a prize for the best answer to a “suffrage conundrum.” The women sold sunflowers in lieu of suffrage buttons, and art posters as well. The Mill Valley Record encouraged everyone to attend, stating that “”Miss Maud Younger will make a short address on “The Vote and Its Achievementʼʼ for those who want to hear “suffrage” and there will be the Hawaiian orchestra and tea and refreshments for those who do not.” Speaker Younger of the Wage Earners League was joined by Lillian Palmer, who spoke from the the business woman’s perspective.

It does not appear, at least outwardly, that couples such as Palmer/Williams and O’Hara/Livermore experienced discrimination due to their choice of life-long partners. The same was not true for women suffragists of color. Perhaps the most unique views offered at the garden party were those of “an educated Indian squaw who tells fortunes and gives suffrage talks from the squaw viewpoint.” The San Francisco Call labelled this woman one of the main attractions, as she would “not only read the individual fortunes of the guests, but will look into the future for revelations of statewide importance. She will also be included among the suffrage speakers, and will present her topic from the standpoint of a woman of her race.”

Unfortunately, the identity of this Native American woman is not known, nor are her revelations for the success of the suffrage amendment. The newspapers printed names of speakers Palmer and Younger, of the party organizers and of each society woman who rode the yellow omnibus to the San Anselmo garden party but omitted the name of the Native American “squaw” suffragist. Too little is known about Native American women who pioneered in the suffrage movement, but this woman must have been an activist like Irene Odock from the Colusa reservation. Author of “An appeal for the Indian,” published in the February 1914 edition of the magazine Out West, Odock was perhaps the first Indian woman in California to register to vote.

The garden party organizers aimed to raise campaign funds for the suffrage campaign throughout the state. They accomplished this goal, with funds donated not just locally, but from the New York Men’s Suffrage League and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. On October 10, 1911, the amendment passed by a extremely narrow majority (50.7 percent), making California the sixth state granting suffrage to women.

A staunch advocate for women in the workforce, Lillian Palmer continued her activism. She co-founded and became the first president of the Business and Professional Women’s Club of San Francisco. Palmer was quoted as saying, “Women in business must play the game as men have established it.” She played it well, vying with rival Dick Van Erp for talented designers to join her firm. During her lifetime, Palmer’s work gained wide acclaim. Today her pieces are highly collectible. Lillian Palmer and Emily Williams are buried together in Los Gatos Memorial Park.

1. San Francisco Call, April 18, 1907.

2. Mill Valley Record, August 25, 1911.

3. San Francisco Call, September 7,1911.

4. San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, March 26, 1912.