The traditional narrative of the women’s suffrage movement has presented a “respectable” version of suffrage history primarily focused on the prominent role of elite, cisgender, heterosexual white women in fighting for the vote. Scholars are currently challenging that narrative. The story of California suffragists Gail Laughlin and Dr. Mary Austin Sperry “queers” our understanding of suffrage history by revealing the ways that suffragists transgressed normative boundaries of gender and sexuality not only in their norm-defying gender expressions, but in their non-heteronormative domestic arrangements.

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.