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SFist Tonight
Another item culled directly from the pages of our historical newspapers, this one from the period in which California women had just won the right to vote -- something for which the country as a whole would need to wait seven more years.
This hardly made San Francisco a bastion of progressive feminist thought. We scarcely need to point it out, but note the amusement and disdain in this articles' treatment of the first female applicant to the San Francisco Police Department:
Miss Goldie Griffin Wants to Become Cop and Asks for the Job
City Attorney Debating Eligibility of Women for Such Posts
Miss Goldie Griffin, horsewoman, athlete, sometime actress, and young and attractive to boot, wants to be a policewoman in San Francisco. Also she perfectly don't care a good piece of fudge who knows it.
She has made application to be a police woman, believing that she can walk a beat just as well as any member of the city's finest, and she intends to walk that beat if there is any way that she possibly can do so. She is thoroughly and absolutely convinced that she can jail drunk and disorderly persons, break up fights, arrest robbers and other horrid men who would try to disturb the peace and quiet of San Francisco, and do everything in the line of policing that any mere man cop can do.
And it might be remarked in passing that Miss Goldie may become a policewoman at that. So far as has yet been discovered there seems to be no legal reason why she should not.
Saturday morning it was when Miss Goldie announced to the world her yearning to be a cop. She announced it to the Civil Service Commission in a mighty business-like way:
"I desire to take an examination and join the police force" she announced severely to the clerk in the civil service office. "I can vote, and I can ride, and I am just as well fitted to be a uniformed officer as any man."
Chief Examiner J. J. Maher of the Civil Service Board began looking up authorities. He couldn't find any place in the charter or laws of the city where police women were mentioned. Also, he couldn't find any where they were prohibited. So he's going to put the matter up to the City Attorney and let him do a little thinking on the proposition.
Miss Goldie, who used to be with the "101 Ranch (Wild West Show)" and rode last week in the "Society Circus", says she is going to consult authorities too. She has a large and growing hunch that she could pass a civil service examination, if she is allowed to take a try at one.
San Francisco Chronicle -- 12.9.1912
Though the bewilderment of the city is almost amusing in its clueless certainty that such a thing just couldn't be allowed, the truth was that the San Francisco Police Department was already way behind the times. After all, by late 1912 the Los Angeles Police Department already employed three policewomen and three police matrons.
San Francisco wouldn't give a girl a break or a badge until two years later, but they finally caught up in style, hiring a trio of women who became known around town as The Three Kates: Kathryn Sullivan, Kathryne Eisenhart, and Kate O'Conner.
And what became of "Miss Goldie Griffin"? Sadly, we haven't been able to track this gutsy woman down. If you happen to know, please leave a comment and fill us all in. Whatever her life turned out to be, we're sure the story's a good one.
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Great and fun article; thanks!
May I be a stuffed shirt, though, and point out that women in pre-Revolutionary New Jersey could vote. We had to give that up for Independence.
Goldie was included in an art show that's up at FIFTY24SF right now. Jeremy Fish did a series of character/historical studies from the Barbary Coast era. His style is great, and the content is really fun and informative.
The grammar is about on par for most blogs.
I'm really loving this history series. Thanks richard!
Back in the day Miss Goldie Griffin fights to obtain the same employment rights as men.
Today, women on Yelp post how great a mayor Newsom is because he's "hot."
Miss Goldie Griffin, hope you're not too dizzy from spinning in your f**king grave.