EMILY PITTS STEVENS

Emily Pitts Stevens was a pioneering newspaper editor and suffragist who fought fearlessly for women’s rights in the 1860s and ‘70s.

In 1869, at the age of 25, she bought a half interest in a San Francisco newspaper, the California Weekly Mercury – which called itself a “Journal of Romance and Literature.” She renamed it The Pioneer and turned it into the West’s first suffrage newspaper.

In her first issue as publisher, she wrote: “The wrongs of woman, the many abuses she has suffered, have at last [been] aroused from their lethargic sleep. We shall claim for the right of suffrage – believing by this she will gain the position for which God intended her – equality with man.”

Stevens hired women to set type for her newspaper in defiance of the Printers’ Union. She pushed for equal pay and an eight-hour workday for women.

She once attended a speech by an anti-suffragist, heckled the speaker mercilessly, pulled out a gun and challenged a state assemblyman in the audience to a duel.

The Sacramento Daily Union headlined, “A Shameful Scene at Platt’s Hall – Women Suffragists Disgracing Their Sex.”

Pitts Stevens was a tireless advocate for women’s rights, temperance, and educational opportunities.

She died in 1906 – five years before California voters gave women the right to vote.