A California Girl

by Edward Eldridge

Now that Southern California had gone overwhelmingly for the C.I. Penloe and Stella, Barker and Brookes, felt at liberty to accept some of the many urgent calls from other parts of the State. They were continually receiving calls from other States, but would accept none till the same condition prevailed throughout the whole State as now existed in Southern California and the State Legislature had granted to woman the same legal standing in the eyes of the law that man had.

The next places visited by the workers were Bakersfield, Hanford, Tulare, Visalia, Fresno, Oakland, and San Francisco. In all these places they found the work in a more or less advanced state. The fact that Southern California had gone for the C.I. was a great help in forwarding the movement in other places, so that after about eight months' work in these cities just named, and some other places, it was found that the entire State had been carried for the C.M. and Woman's Suffrage, except one county. The Legislature was about to meet in a month's time, and would give to woman the suffrage, and place her, in other respects, on an equality with man in the eyes of the law.

Great work was being done in the last county, so that it joined the rest of California for progressive thought, and the whole State was carried for the C.I. just as the Legislature passed the necessary acts for woman's legal freedom. The news was wired to every State in the Union, and California was one scene of rejoicing throughout the entire State. It was a great day for California when her men and women threw off the yoke of superstition and ignorance and thus cut some of the bonds which had held them in ignorance. They had taken one great stride toward the goal of freedom. California now took her true place among the States in the Union, for she led the way toward freedom in its highest sense.

The leaders of advanced thought in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho were very active in working for the C.I. All these States having granted woman the suffrage before the C.M. was started, the workers found it easy to get them to follow California in the grand procession for freedom.

Wyoming, which was the first to grant the suffrage to woman, was the next to join California; then came Colorado, then Utah, and then Idaho wheeled into line.

Penloe and Stella were receiving calls to labor from other States, and finally decided to go to Illinois. Kansas wired the following message to the Central Committee of California: "Kansas is all ablaze with the C.M. from its center to its circumference, and its fires have leaped the borders into Nebraska, Iowa, and reached Minnesota."

After the C.I. had been practised in Southern California a few months, if a young gentleman had just returned to the East from Los Angeles, his friends wanted to know immediately how the C.I. worked.

Mr. Franklin Hart, of New York, a young gentleman who had just returned from Los Angeles, was sitting in a parlor with some young friends, and they all wanted him to relate his impressions of the C.I. in Los Angeles. When he was describing its workings, two or three young ladies put their hands to their faces and laughed, one saying, "How strange and funny it must have seemed." Another young lady remarked, "There has been too much foolishness about such things." Mr. Franklin Hart said: "After you have been there about a week the old idea seems stranger than the new. You wonder to yourself however such thoughts could have fastened themselves on us for generations and generations."

Prof. Dawson, of Boston, visited Los Angeles two years after the C.I. had been in operation, and wrote a letter to the leading Boston daily, as follows:

"Dear Sir: Being naturally of a conservative turn of mind, I came to Los Angeles with ideas unfavorable to the C.M. I had not taken the least stock in what the papers said or the people of California wrote in regard to the practical workings of the C.I. I expected the defenses of morality and modesty had been swept away by such ideas, and that the communities of Southern California had sunk into licentiousness. I had spent two years in California about eight years ago, and I considered at that time that the morals of the people were not of a high order. So I expected to find society in a still worse moral condition now. I have been here six months, and, in justice to truth, I must state the facts even if they show that my previous opinions were incorrect. To those who study the people closely in regard to sex matters, I can say truthfully that sexual excitement has fallen fifty per cent., and that obscene pictures and stories have no attraction for the people. The low places of amusement, that used to be run under the name of 'Variety Theaters,' and other such names, are closed up, for the reason, as a former proprietor of one of these resorts expressed it, 'A leg and bosom show has no attraction for the people since the C.I. has been in operation.' Houses of prostitution are less in number by forty per cent., so the chief of police informed me, and I saw a large number of them closed. The low dives are closed, and places where girls made exhibitions of themselves for the sole purpose of exciting passion in man are no more. They died for want of patronage. The forms of each sex are looked at now with eyes which see purity and beauty.