Votes for Women: San Francisco’s Bold Battle for the Ballot

Briefly About the Tour:

Follow in the footsteps of San Francisco suffragists who won the vote nine years before women could vote nationwide. Uncover the struggles and triumphs of these trailblazing women on a walking tour of sites significant to San Francisco’s suffrage leaders, from Nob Hill through the Tenderloin, Civic Center, Union Square, Financial District, and the Ferry Building.

More About the Tour:

Long before the 19th Amendment became law, San Francisco’s women were already casting their ballots. How? California women won the right to vote in 1911—nine years before the rest of the nation caught up.

This walking tour traces how clubwomen, working girls, early civil rights activists, and gender-defying rebels united across class and cultural lines to win the vote in California. Starting with wealthy white women from religious and reformist clubs—who sought to end human trafficking, domestic violence, and poverty—the city’s suffrage movement quickly expanded. By the early 1900s, downtown shops, union halls, and residential hotels teemed with young women living independently, working in offices and department stores, and demanding their rights.

You’ll Visit:

• The site where Laura de Force Gordon’s speech sparked the West Coast’s suffrage movement.
• The office of The Pioneer, California’s first women’s suffrage journal, founded by Emily Pitts Stevens.
• The Women’s Co-operative Printing Union, which operated for 30 years and published the second cookbook authored by a Black woman.
• The law school that barred the West’s first woman lawyer, Clara Shortridge Foltz, from attending.
• Selina Solomons’ Votes for Women Club, where working-class women grabbed lunch and women’s empowerment.
• The Tenderloin, home to suffrage offices, social rebellion, and the San Francisco Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (WESL)’s office headed by Maud Younger, the “millionaire waitress.”
• Key organizing sites from Nob Hill to Union Square to the Ferry Building —where San Francisco’s suffrage story came full circle.

Whether you’re a history buff, feminist, activist, or simply curious, this walk through San Francisco’s suffrage history offers a powerful lens into how women changed democracy—and how their legacy continues to shape the future.

Meet Your Tour Guide: A Storyteller, Lifelong Truth-Seeker, and Proud Bay Area Native.

Throughout the tour, your guide—Heather Cassell, a San Francisco native and award-winning journalist, publisher, and longtime LGBTQ+ storyteller—shares personal reflections drawn from more than three decades of reporting and activism. From founding the West Coast chapter of the Third Wave Foundation and interning at Curve magazine (then Deneuve), to writing for HUES magazine in the 1990s and covering feminist and queer culture for the Bay Area Reporter and other outlets since the 2000s, Heather has spent her career documenting the fight for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

Whether you’re a visitor, a longtime local, or exploring your own place in the fight for equality, I invite you to join me on this tour honoring the people, places, and movements that won women the right to vote in California and across the United States—and that continue to shape democracy today.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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