Sara Makes a Decision: The Public and Private Life of a Suffragist

I have driven this highway hundreds (maybe thousands) of times since moving to Santa Cruz in the mid-1990s. The winding mountain road is the best, and really only, option to drive from Santa Cruz on the coast, eastward into San Jose, and then north to San Francisco. With the sharp curves and dense forests of redwoods growing right up to the shoulder, it’s not easy to pull off the road on Highway 17. There are no exits or on-ramps, no gas stations, and once you’re on it, you stay on it until you get to the other side, in either direction.

At the start of the southbound side, just as you leave San Jose and pass the town of Los Gatos, The Cats, there’s a sharp pull-off directly into a private driveway. There, just a few feet off the main highway, stands a pair of giant white cat statues guarding the gate to a property once inhabited by a woman who, in the 1910s, was one of the most well-known American suffragists, her name appearing daily in newspapers across the country.

The Cats. Photo by me.

The cat statues sit at the gate of the former estate of Sara Bard Field Wood and Charles Erskine Scott Wood. After years of a long-distance relationship spent traveling between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, Sara and Erskine (as he was called by friends and family) built a home together at The Cats in 1925. Field lived there well into the 1950s, even after Wood’s death in 1944. The property included a house, guest quarters, and a “Poet’s Cottage” as Erskine Wood’s quiet study retreat. From this estate overlooking the Santa Clara Valley, the couple hosted artists, writers, and other prominent figures in public life, as well as private friends and extended family. Poet Carl Sandburg, whom Field had befriended in Chicago, made a point to visit The Cats on a California visit. Novelist John Steinbeck lived nearby in Los Gatos while writing The Grapes of Wrath and Field and Wood hosted the Steinbecks for dinner in the 1930s. (1)

The property is privately owned, but just outside the gate is a small patinated copper sign for the public to view. After some details about the property and some biographical info on Wood, Field’s suffrage work is memorialized on the plaque at her former home: 

Sara Bard Field (1882-1974) became active in the women’s suffrage movement while living in Portland with her husband, Rev. Albert Ehrgott. In 1912, she helped lead a successful statewide campaign, winning the right to vote for Oregon women. In 1915, while living in San Francisco, she led a cross-country speaking tour, ultimately delivering a petition with over 500,000 signatures to President Wilson. Five years later, women’s right to vote was secured by the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The plaque was dedicated in 2015, exactly 100 years after Field's "cross-country speaking tour." A suffrage road trip.

The highway we drive today opened up that same year, 1915. Sara Bard Field must have traveled back-and-forth along the highway many times between Los Gatos and San Francisco or to see her family in Berkeley. The road would have been even more inaccessible, the cars even slower, the location even more remote than the mountain road we still drive today.

Announcement for opening of the new highway between San Jose and Santa Cruz, California. 

San Francisco Chronicle, November 28, 1915

The good roads movement of the 1910s promoted auto transportation and tourism by connecting cities and states from coast-to-coast. Sara Bard Field’s cross-country tour (mentioned on the plaque) began at the Panama-Pacific International Expo (or world’s fair) in San Francisco in September 1915 and followed the new Lincoln Highway’s northern route from the west, through the midwest, and into the northeast. The completion of the Lincoln Highway coincided with the Panama-Pacific Expo and the first full east-to-west automobile journey from New York to San Francisco was celebrated just a few weeks before Field set out on her trip. (2)

Sara Bard Field was in the right place at the right time that summer when she received an enticing offer from a national suffrage leader. Alice Paul was the dynamic leader of the new Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (or CU), a committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Women already had the right to vote in many western states, including California (1911). With the world's fair bringing attention and visitors to California in 1915, the Congressional Union wanted to build on that momentum by organizing women voters to push for a federal suffrage amendment. Field was already a veteran of suffrage activism in the successful campaigns in Oregon (1912) and Nevada (1914). As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1915, the CU wanted to put her to work right away at the Expo. Field wrote to Erskine Wood in Portland, joking that “The Congressional Union are hot and heavy on my trail.” (3)

By August 1915, Field had accepted a paid position as “assistant Organizer to Doris Stevens,” Alice Paul’s co-leader in the CU and a national organizer coordinating suffrage activities at the Panama-Pacific International Expo. Field lamented that “the salary is almost nothing,” but was excited to report that “I shall be at the Exposition booth most of the day meeting people and explaining the Federal Amendment.” (4) 

The Panama-Pacific Expo was a temporary event, though, and soon Alice Paul had another offer that would go beyond California: 

Did Field want to lead a group of envoys on a cross-country publicity tour for the national suffrage cause?  

Alice Paul wanted to send representatives of the women voters from the enfranchised western states to Washington, D.C. to hand-deliver petition signatures gathered at the Panama-Pacific Expo that year demanding a federal amendment. As Field explained, “They say that Congress could scarcely refuse to give ear to two women who come with a message from four million voting women and who have made so long a pilgrimage to bring the message.” (5)

The offer sounded wonderful for an activist and a writer like Field. Expenses covered, a chance to participate on the national suffrage stage, her name and her own articles in newspaper publications across several states, and a well-publicized audience with the President of the United States. 

But behind the scenes of a busy suffrage career, Sara Bard Field’s personal life was complicated. In 1915, she was a 33-year-old, newly divorced mother of two, living in San Francisco and trying to find a way to build a life with her lover, Erskine Wood, who lived and worked in Portland, Oregon. Field was the one who had been unfaithful in her marriage and, in 1914, she initiated and received a divorce from her husband, Albert Ehrghott, who retained custody of their children. She already lived apart from her children, Kay (age 14) and Albert (age 9), who lived with their father in Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco. The road trip would mean three more months of full separation, potentially making public some of the already private criticism about her status as a divorced woman, her involvement with free love and with suffrage, and her fitness as a mother. 

Besides being a divorced mother, Field was also romantically attached to a married man. While still married to her first husband, Sara Bard Field began a relationship with Erskine Wood, a man thirty years her senior who was an advocate of free love and involved in sexual relationships with at least three other women at that time. Sara didn’t want marriage from Erskine, but, by 1915, she wanted exclusivity and she wanted to live together, or at least live in the same city. He could offer her neither, not yet. Their time of finally living together at The Cats in Los Gatos was still a decade away. Sara and Erskine did eventually legally marry, but not until 1938.

Before making a final decision to go on the road trip, Sara claimed she would give up her suffrage work and the road trip for any sign she could be in Erskine’s life: “Can I be away on the other side of the continent from you for weeks and weeks and still live? I do not know.” Less than two weeks before her planned departure, Field begged for his blessing and his advice: “Shall I come to you or stay here or go East? Tell me. Please.” (6) Still not hearing from him and running out of time, a few days later she repeated the plea, “Tell me what you most desire me to do . . . I am giving no final reply to the Con Union till I hear from you.” (7)

The couple also both worried that Sara’s health would not allow such a journey. She suffered chronic health problems throughout her life, including fatigue, anxiety, headaches, and heavy and painful menstrual periods. She had permanent injuries from the birth of her children, suffered several miscarriages, and eventually had at least one abortion, possibly more. In September 1915, on the eve of the road trip, there was even a hint that Sara might be pregnant again. Erskine recommended she get an abortion, especially if she planned to go on the road trip: “All I want to say is - much as my heart thrills at the thought of our child - You are after all the whole world to me. I cannot bear to risk you. Make sure of that my darling.” (8) A pregnancy in the fall of 1915 would have been poorly timed and might have led to a different decision about her suffrage work. But it turned out that Sara was not pregnant this time.

Erskine Wood and Sara Bard Field, circa 1920

Living apart from Erskine and from her children, with no other way to financially support herself, Field finally accepted Alice Paul’s offer to go East on the suffrage road trip. 

Sara Bard Field did not travel alone. And, in fact, she did not know how to drive. She was to travel with Maria Kindberg and Ingeborg Kindstedt, suffragists from Rhode Island who owned a brand-new Overland car and, more importantly, knew how to drive and maintain an automobile. Another prominent national suffrage organizer and friend of Field’s from the Nevada campaign, Mabel Vernon, would travel by train ahead of the car and connect with local suffrage chapters to set up events, parades, and meetings with mayors and other dignitaries in every major city the envoys visited and, most importantly, make sure their activities received extensive press coverage.

The three women set out from San Francisco on September 25, 1915 and drove through 22 states. They arrived in Washington, D.C. in time for a December 6th meeting with President Wilson, hand-delivering a petition of signatures gathered in support of a simple message, which they carried on a banner on their car:

WE DEMAND an AMENDMENT to the

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

ENFRANCHISING WOMEN

Sara Bard Field (left), Maria Kindberg, and Ingeborg Kindstedt in front of the car they drove

from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1915

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Thanks for reading!  If you would like to follow along on Sara Bard Field's cross-country journey, and know more about Sara and Erskine's story, be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter list below for the next installment!

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Notes:

1. The visit with Carl Sandburg is recounted in Sara Bard Field (Wood), “Friends at the Cats” (XLI: 565), Suffragists Oral History Project, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Sara noted dinner with the Steinbecks in her datebook entry for November 6, 1936, in manuscripts by Sara Bard (Field) Wood, Diaries, 1913-1937, in Charles Erskine Scott Wood Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; John Steinbeck mentions talking with his Los Gatos neighbor Charles Erskine Scott Wood in Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1997 Penguin edition), p. 122.

2. For the history and route of the Lincoln Highway, see https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/history. On celebrating the opening of the Lincoln Highway at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Expo, see Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), vol. 4, p. 230. 

3.  Letter SBF to CESW, undated [June 1915 folder], Huntington Library

4. Letter SBF to CESW, August 8, 1915, Huntington Library

   
   

5. Letter SBF to CESW, September 5, 1915, Huntington Library

   
   

6. Letter SBF to CESW, September 5, 1915, Huntington Library

   
   

7. Letter SBF to CESW, September 9, 1915, Huntington Library

   
   

8. Letter CESW to SBF, September 26, 1915, Huntington Library. A well-documented abortion the following summer, in 1916, resulted in severe hemorrhaging and a serious medical crisis for Sara, recounted in Sherry L. Smith, Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2020), pp. 195-196.