In 1912, one year after women won the right to vote in California, Luella Johnston became the first woman elected to Sacramento’s city council, and to any city council in the state. She played an integral role linking the local clubwomen, progressive, and suffrage movements in California’s capital city. Her remarkable life provides a case study of how women in the early 1900s acquired and used political power, and in doing so changed their own and public perceptions of a woman’s role in the public sphere.

During the late 1930s Los Angeles' public sphere was radically transformed through the actions of a little known citizens' organization which created and deployed a sophisticated surveillance apparatus to pursue reform of the city government. That group—CIVIC—labored to convince the voting public that municipal officials had provided police protection to organized gambling and prostitution operations in exchange for campaign contributions. In their efforts to dismantle an economic and political status quo, CIVIC operated both surreptitiously and in plain sight, all the while seeking the participation of the people of Los Angeles in what was publicized as a citizens' crusade to purge the city of its corrupt political and criminal leadership.