Suffragists Campaigned Among Ramona Men 100 Years Ago To Get the Right To Vote

One hundred years ago, Ramona was on a list of communities in a suffragists' tour to help women get the right to vote in California.

An exhibit marking the right-to-vote anniversary opened Monday in the lobby of the City of San Diego Administration Building. The exhibit includes mannequins in period clothing, old newspapers and photographs, and panels with information on the campaign for women's suffrage in San Diego county.

Ashley Gardner, of the Womens Museum of California, said Charlotte Baker, the first female physician in San Diego, headed up the right-to-vote effort. The highlight of the suffrage campaign was a three-day driving tour to outlying communities like Ramona, Oceanside and Fallbrook by three suffragists led by Baker over rough and dusty roads—in a car driven by a girl who was about 16 years old, Gardner said. She said they believed that rural men would approve of a woman's right to vote because they toiled in the fields together.

"Rural men really appreciated the idea of women as equal partners,'' Gardner said.

In a 1911 election on a suffrage referendum in which only men could cast ballots, California became the sixth and largest state in the country to allow women to vote. But women were not allowed to go to the polls for federal elections until nine years later, according to Gardner.

—City News Service contributed to this report.