The link between CCA and a historical poster championing votes for women
CCA’s creative citizens from the past include Bertha M. Boyé who over a century ago helped achieve women’s suffrage in California through her art, nine years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Bertha M. Boyé, Votes for Women, 1913. Lithograph sheet. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
Did you know that over 100 years ago, one CCA [then known as California School of Arts and Crafts (CSAC)] faculty member wielded her creative talents to manifest votes for women in California? With the 1911 passage of California Proposition 4, the number of women with full voting rights in the United States doubled, and San Francisco became the most populous city in the world in which women could vote.
Sculptor, illustrator, and CCA faculty member Bertha M. Boyé (1883–1931) is best known for her 1911 Votes for Women drawing, which was the winning design for a local contest and was distributed in posters and postcards all over California and beyond. The poster became one of the most iconic images of the Women’s Suffrage movement.
Boyé attended the California School of Design and was commissioned to create many public artworks; however, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire completely melted many of her bronze sculptures. Meanwhile, Boyé was treasurer of the Sketch Club of San Francisco, which began in 1887 as an independent group of women artists who met to share and critique one another’s work and evolved into the arts organization San Francisco Women Artists. Members regularly gathered to draw from live models (Jack London, while a student at Oakland High School, was one of the models for the Oakland chapter).
During CCA's Voter Registration Day, the campus community screenprints special posters led by faculty member Chris Treggiari and Chair of Illustration Michael Wertz.
While Boyé was developing some of the first sculpture courses at CCA/CSAC, she also engaged in an array of practical and political endeavors, committed to producing and exhibiting her own work while also engaging others (especially young women) in developing skills to support themselves, from the ground up.
Today, CCA continues the legacy of empowering our campus and community to civically engage on the critical issues of our time. We remember Boyé and her work and the importance and power of the right to vote.
