Ada Clare, illustration for Garrets and Pretenders, 1933.
Strike a pose as a reformer in California, and you're likely to stir up a crowd willing to argue for just about anything--no matter how serious, no matter how trivial.
In the 1860's, feminist Ada Clare, known as the "Queen of Bohemia," arrived in California from New York. In May of 1864, she satirized what she evidently viewed as a growing laundry list of social issues by creating a new one, anti-pieism.
Temperance, anti-lunatic asylumism, anti-slavery, anti-capital punishment, anti-greenbacks and anti-women's rights, are getting to be very tedious insects. I offer to any enterprising reformer, as a gift, my new branch of philanthropy—a crusade against the fatal pie.
I enroll myself as the first anti-pieatist.
By the pie, I mean that dense leaden-hued or flakily unctuous (as the case may be) concavity of dough, within which certain substances are forcibly imprisoned, called generally after respectable fruits. This awful thing has found its way into most private dwellings and all public houses.
Into the innocent mouth this thing is thrust, crammed, nay jammed!
Admired by Walt Whitman as a "new woman born too soon," Clare offered readers of The Golden Era a feisty voice for social change in California.
California dreams—howsoever they are conceived—perenially attract emigrants to the Golden State. Unfortunately for the emigrants, those dreams don't always pan out.
Ada Clare was an east coast feminist who came to California in 1864. Far from the stifling influences of stodgy Easterners, she wrote weekly columns for the San Francisco Golden Era, which sometimes expressed her unique opinion of Californians, including—in her disappointed view—their reluctance to embrace late-coming strangers.
The invocation here is "go, and God bless you," "and if you must call again, call when you can't stay quite as long. . . ."
No wonder people are anxious to get away from California, for they feel that they cannot by any amount of mental tip-toeing rise up to her standard. They can never, unless they came here in the mining days, display that courage, intelligence and taste which so runs riot here. Modesty and true appreciation of the surpassing merits of California alone cause people to hanker after leaving the Golden State behind them.
California is pledged to prosperity, is bound over to keep success, and the more people that come here and go away, the more profitable will be the steam navigation of the Pacific, and navigation is the thief of time.
Moral: Rolling mosses gather no stones.
Ada Clare wrote of Californians that they were a "people without any remembered past," perhaps one reason she stayed here less than a year before eventually returning east.
Stoop to Them
From "The Man's Sphere of Influence," 1864.
The Golden Era magazine, 1887.
Nineteenth century California may have seemed like a jerkwater region compared to the sophisticated cities of the eastern seaboard. At least here, however, the male of the species could attain his proper glory.
After feminist Ada Clare came to California in 1864, she wrote weekly columns for the San Francisco Golden Era. Many of these discussed the true characteristics of women—and their male helpmates.
. . . is it strictly proper that a man should take care of himself, mind his own business and act like a rational, sincere and responsible human being. All this might do very well if it would end here; but alas! may it not lead the man to the rostrum, the pulpit, the auctioneer's desk, and finally into the editor's sanctum.
There are many things he can learn with impunity—the multiplication table for instance. . . .
But why puzzle his brain, built for the cultivation of the moral sense and the adaptation of virtue, with such abstruse sciences as geography, history, grammar, spelling, gauging, etc.
It must not be supposed that we despise men; in their proper sphere we are willing to love, cherish and protect them. But we do not want them as rivals; we wish them low, in order that we may be able to come down from our dignity and stoop to them. Their strength must lie in their weakness. When we draw them under the wings of our protection, let them not take to crowing.
Walt Whitman called Ada Clare "a new woman born too soon." She stayed in California less than a year.
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