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“This Social Mother in Whose Household We All Live”: Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson's Early Twentieth-Century Socialist Feminism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Stephen E. Barton
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Abstract

J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

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Essays
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 532 - 563
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Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

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Footnotes

1

This paper began as one of the Berkeley Historical Society presentations commemorating the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage in California. I am grateful to Sherry Jeanne Katz, Douglas Firth Anderson, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

References

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48 Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 49–103.

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53 Berkeley Independent, Oct. 20, 21, 1912.

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60 The New Hampshire (Durham, NH), Jan. 28. 1920.

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74 “Stitt Wilson Is Confident,” Berkeley Gazette, Oct. 28, 1912.

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76 “Mayor Wilson Is Not in Contest for Re-Election,” San Francisco Call, Feb. 20, 1913; J. Stitt Wilson, “Letter to Berkeley Socialists Declining the Nomination for the Mayoralty of Berkeley,” Feb. 19, 1913, repr. in Vocational Education, 32–36.

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78 Ibid., Feb. 22, 1913.

79 Ferrier, William Warren, Berkeley, California: The Story of the Evolution of a Hamlet into a City of Culture and Commerce (Berkeley, 1933), 267–69Google Scholar; Berkeley Gazette, Dec. 27, 1912.

80 California Social Democrat, June 21, 1913.

81 J. Stitt Wilson, “After Suffrage, What?” California Social Democrat, June 13, 1914.

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