Foltz, Clara Shortridge

Clara Shortridge Foltz was a pioneering woman attorney who opened the California bar to women lawyers. She practiced law until the age of 80 and innovated the idea of an office of public defender. Foltz was active in the fight for suffrage in California. She served as a Trustee of the State Normal School in Los Angeles, ending her term in 1891. In 1892 she ran for the position of City Attorney in San Francisco. Had she won the office, Foltz would have argued that, despite her sex, she was eligible to hold it because of a 1879 state constitutional clause enabling women to pursue any form of employment. Foltz also ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1930, at the age of eighty-one, "appealing to the womanhood" of the state. The New York Times reported that she won eight thousand votes in the Republican primary. Foltz began her reform activism as a Republican. From 1888 to 1890 she was associated with the Democratic Party. In 1890 she became interested in the utopian socialism of Bellamy Nationalism, and two years later, Populism. In 1892 ran for San Francisco city attorney on the People's Party ticket. Trying once again for elected office, Foltz ran for the State Senate in 1912. Foltz married young, had five children, and divorced at the age of thirty (often, to maintain respectability, she said that her husband had died).