Marietta

Marietta Stow was the first woman to run for vice president. She was the running mate of Belva Lockwood in her 1884 campaign for president, and the running mate of Victoria Woodhull in her 1892 campaign for president (while Woodhull was abroad).

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The Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, announced her candidacy by declaring her the “Battle-Axe of Female Liberty,” noting in its coverage of Stow’s speech that “a time has come in the affairs of Man when the ferocity of Woman must be curbed.”

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Stow is largely absent from the published record of women’s efforts in politics. A 1980 book was published about Stow’s life, titled, “Woman's Republic: The Life of Marietta Stow, Cooperator.” This book, though, is extremely obscure. (Even in archives of papers, it seems to me most copies of the book in any kind of collection are photocopies.) As one might imagine, researching Stow’s life is challenging. (Note: if anyone is aware of where I can find that book, please let me know.)

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Marietta Stow was born in either in 1830 or in 1837. (Note: Stow was not her maiden name; I have not found her maiden name.) She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and taught school through her early adulthood. She married young, and was divorced in her early twenties. After her divorce, she supported herself as a public lecturer, speaking in behalf of shop girls and, later, orphaned daughters of Union soldiers.

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Stow moved from Ohio to California, settling in San Francisco. San Francisco would be the home base for much of her advocacy of the next several decades. While there, she met Joseph Stow; the pair married when she was 36 years old. Joseph Stow was a member of the local San Francisco elite.

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Stow became active in California’s suffragist movement. In 1869, she became president of the San Francisco Women's Suffrage Association. Stow wanted to widen support for the women's suffrage movement in California, and so she called for a meeting in Sacramento. The organization rejected the idea, instead wanting to keep the San Francisco Women's Suffrage Association in San Francisco. Stow resigned from the presidency of the suffrage organization, but remained committed to women's suffrage and advancement.

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In 1874, Joseph Stow, Marietta’s husband died. She was in Europe at the time of his death, and the courts denied the money he had left in his will, an impressive $200,000 (~$5 million in 2022). Stow became a zealous advocate for probate law reform, an area of law with extensive gender inequality at the time. She proposed a bill in the California legislature in 1876 that a widow would be granted control of putting the couple's property and of putting their affairs in order.

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Stow published a book on the topic of probate laws in 1876, titled “Probate Confiscation: Unjust Laws Which Govern Woman.” (The book is in the public domain and freely available.)

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In 1879, she began a collaborative effort with Washington, D.C. lawyer Belva Lockwood. Their goal was to reform marital property rights and estate laws. The pair brought the bill to the House of Representatives, and it was introduced in committee in December of 1879. Their efforts were rebuffed. (If you remember, Belva Lockwood had spent the last several years being an unapologetic thorn in Congress' side, so perhaps this was unsurprising.)

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Stow’s efforts in reforming probate law were detailed in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism in 1995, in an article titled, “In Her Own Way: Marietta Stow's Crusade for Probate Law Reform Within the Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Movement,” written by Donna Schuele, now a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Stow became involved a newspaper publisher in 1881, founding a monthly newspaper titled "Woman's Herald of Industry and Social Science Cooperator." She used her newspaper for political purposes and to promote the philosophy of positivism, the new science of sociology, and the idea of industrial education for women. As editor, she encouraged the discussion of birth control, eugenics, a shorter work day, crime prevention, and the “mischief resulting from a purely masculine form of government in Church and State.”

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It became a vehicle for Stow to further nascent political ambitions.

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Stow’s first political run was for the position of San Francisco School Director in 1880. In 1881, she announced the formation of the Woman's Independent Political Party, which sought to further women's political participation primarily by building political confidence in women – she wanted to encourage women to feel confident in their own political power.

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She ran for governor of California in 1882 as an independent candidate, using her newspaper to further her campaign. She declared herself “anti-monopoly, anti-ring, anti-Chinese,” healthy and “unpickled with whiskey and tobacco.” In other editions of her newspapers, she declared she was a “self-made woman, a farmer’s daughter educated at Oberlin.…” As governor she pledged to “give women the ballot” and, again, “retire the Chinese.”

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The anti-Chinese aspect of Stow's campaign is complicated. There were two distinct schools of thought regarding Chinese immigration to the United States. The first, most common, and perhaps most reflective of white suffragist politics, was pure racism. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was reflective of this racism. Americans on the West Coast attributed declining wages and economic issues to Chinese immigrant workers. People from China comprised 0.002% of America's population at the time, but Congress passed the exclusion act to placate workers and to assuage concerns about white "racial purity." (While California was not the South, Reconstruction had ended five years prior, and in the minds of many white people it was time for white Americans to reinforce their supremacy--against any minority group: Black Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italian, etc.)

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On the other hand, there was a certain noblesse oblige to some quarters of anti-Chinese immigration advocacy. There was a movement in parts of the United States to bring in Chinese workers to work on plantations after the abolition of slavery. Some abolitionists believed Chinese immigration should be limited to prevent mistreatment of Chinese immigrants from becoming a new incarnation of chattel slavery.

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It is unknowable which of these two areas animated Stow’s anti-Chinese sentiments. It is hard not to see racism in her words, though.

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She did not win. (In the 140 years since Stow’s run, California has yet to elect a woman as governor. California is one of 19 states who have not.)

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In 1884, Stow and Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be a licensed lawyer in the United States, decided to nominate Belva Lockwood for the United States presidency on the National Equal Rights Party ticket. Stow was, in turn, selected to be Lockwood's vice-presidential nominee. The Equal Rights Party platform included equal rights for men and women, women's suffrage a curtailment of the liquor sales, uniform marriage and divorce laws for the entire nation, and "universal peace." Lockwood and Stow were at odds on the topic of Chinese rights: Lockwood was outspokenly supportive, whereas Stow was not. Stow was accused of being too outspoken; she was notably against the Republican Party at the time and believed it was a dying group. The ticket won some 4,100 votes nationwide. Lockwood would rail against what she believed to be voter fraud for years following the election, and would run for president again in 1888.

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In 1892, Stow was again nominated for the vice presidency. Victoria Woodhull was nominated for the presidency, though she was an American expatriate in the United Kingdom at the time. The Woodhull/Stow ticket was nominated by the National Woman Suffragists' Nominating Convention, which appears to have been the remnant of the National Equal Rights Party that survived into the 1890s.

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Marietta Stow died of breast cancer in 1902. California women would not gain the right to vote until 1911.

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