FROM THE LBPL ARCHIVES
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed women's right to vote in 1920, but in the years leading up to that, women in a handful of states, including California, had fought for and won that right already.
California voted to pass election reform on October 10, 1911, and on October 13, 27 year-old Long Beach resident Charlotte Carlin became the first registered woman voter in Los Angeles county.
Carlin registered to vote moments after state officials acknowledged the passing of Proposition 4, which granted California women the right to vote. Voting for Prop 4 had taken place earlier that week as part of a special election, and the proposition passed with a narrow 50.7% victory.
Early polling results seemed to indicate the reform was doomed to fail, but the suffrage movement edged a last-minute victory with major support coming from late-reporting rural areas of the state. San Francisco county reportedly had the most opposition to the reform, with only 38% voting in favor of it. The proposition passed in Los Angeles county with 55% approval. A similar proposition had failed in California in 1896, with only 44.6% of voters in support.
Several days after she registered to vote, Carlin was recruited by members of Long Beach's local Citizens' Party to run for tax collector in the upcoming December 1911 Long Beach election. She withdrew from the race soon after, reportedly at the request of her father, a local milk inspector and advocate of the competing Charter Party. In the end, though the Long Beach election set new records in terms of turnout, it was a rout in favor of the Charter Party, and all of the Citizens' Party candidates were defeated.
