Well before the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women nationwide in 1920, Californians embraced women’s suffrage. From 1911 to 1920, competing groups of California women sought to define womanhood in the context of citizenship. If women would now be full citizens, with the right to vote, who would be considered qualified for this right, or would it be a privilege of the few? Organized womanhood and its defining citizenship would be a powerful force of conservatism in a wave a progressive change and provide the basis for exclusion nationwide after the ephemeral triumph of women’s suffrage.