by Hugh Ambrose
The gala ended successfully for Pauline, with a request from Will Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to join the party’s Ways and Means Committee for New York City, raising money for the 1920 campaign.3 Her work would focus on bringing other wealthy women onto the committee, using their endorsements to woo women voters. Pauline hoped exposure from her new position would impress the Republicans in and around Southampton, the community near the tip of Long Island, New York, where the Sabins’ summer estate was located, and where she planned to convince the Suffolk County Republican Party to select her as one of its delegates to the party’s state committee meeting in February 1920. For the first time, women would be permitted to vote in the party primaries, allowing them to help choose party leaders and frame party platforms, opening up new avenues of advancement within the party structure.
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She was introduced formally as Mrs. Arthur F. Willebrandt at the many political clubs and civic organizations she joined, although she would push past the necessary formalities as quickly as politeness would admit and establish herself as Mabel Walker Willebrandt. The day she walked into the Hotel Stowell, headquarters of the Republican Party in Los Angeles, and announced her intention to volunteer, the party hacks sat behind their desks, smoke rising from the ashtrays, typewriters clacking, and sized her up. Ignoring her credentials as a lawyer, they noted her dark suit, white blouse opened at the collar, and short hair, sure signs of a politically active woman. They calculated their response not by her dress, however, but by the fact that her husband was a political unknown and therefore she could be ignored. Mrs. Willebrandt knew how to acknowledge their hostility, delivering every word with a charming insouciance, while any man who addressed her received a leveled stare, her mind intently drinking in the words as if committing them to memory, an unnerving and ultimately unforgettable quality.
The indifference of the party men to female activists, however, ran deep.4 Since women had won the vote in California in 1911, they had joined with progressives to push the City of Los Angeles to crack down on brothels and prostitution and outlaw saloons, and, at the state legislature, they had overcome two failed attempts at passing statewide prohibition. Yet their political demands had only grown, a trend many men found irksome.5 Worse, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt’s request to get involved in the party’s organization, especially at the start of a presidential-election year, took a level of self-assertion most Americans of both genders found offensive. A lady was not supposed to work in offices alongside strange men, although exceptions were made for young women employed as teachers or stenographers. Political campaigns inhabited the rough-and-tumble world of men: cutting deals, attacking opponents, sacrificing principles for political or personal gain; in politics, im- morality abounded. The Republican Party headquarters, housed in the twelve-story Hotel Stowell, in Los Angeles’ downtown, was no place for a lady.* The rebuff expected, Willebrandt could afford them a gracious smile, one carrying a silent message: if you think my attempt to volunteer here is audacious, you haven’t seen anything yet.
In 1920 her law practice, her pride and joy, was four years old, situated just a few blocks from the Stowell, in an office she shared with a friend from law school, Fred Horowitz. While Los Angeles was bursting with waves of new inhabitants, new businesses opening, and real estate being developed for miles in all directions, the idea of a female attorney had yet to take hold there. The census of 1920 identified 1,738 women, nationally, in the category of “lawyers, judges and justices,” representing .0002 percent of the more than 8.2 million women in the workforce.6 Yet Willebrandt had managed to build a practice successful enough to allow her to quit her part-time teaching job at a local high school and to eschew divorce cases, the primary source of work for female attorneys. Having a male colleague certainly had helped land cases in the early days, but a growing list of victories in court, including securing one client an award of ten thousand dollars in damages, boosted her reputation.7
For years she had served as an assistant in the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office, created in 1912 by progressives of the Republican Party to ensure effective legal representation for those who could not afford to purchase it. While the U.S. Constitution mandated a defendant’s access to representation, it had become a farce in practice.8 The public defender received compensation; the assistant public defender did not. But it was a demonstration of Willebrandt’s merit, and brought her into contact with the District Attorney’s office, judges, and her peers at the bar—although she was relegated to a special Woman’s Court, advocating for, she later explained, “beaten wives and fallen women.”9
One afternoon, as Assistant Public Defender Willebrandt looked upon an assembly of women arrested for prostitution, she learned that no effort had been made to arrest their clients. It lit a fuse inside her. The next day she dynamited the case against the prostitutes by proclaiming “the impossibility of bringing to justice but one person for an act which constituted a crime only when it implicated two.”10 The judge sustained her motion to dismiss, and the “originality” of the victory reportedly “won her recognition among many of the legal profession who hitherto had probably thought of her only as a woman aspiring to law.”* Neither the first to name the “double standard” nor the last, Willebrandt hated what it represented: biased and unfair characterization of each gender, which led to the rigid roles society defined for males and females.11 Her victory changed little, though. Around the Los Angeles courthouse, as across the land, men were “just being men” when they paid for sex, but society had no compassion for the women whom various circumstances had forced into prostitution. Women who violated the moral code would not be tolerated.
As a spokesperson for the women she represented, Willebrandt was not fighting to restore the status quo ante, which consigned women to the kitchen and the nursery, as espoused by the WCTU; she was trying to tear down the barriers to women’s equality, an aim some women political activists shared. Of course, she never stated her goal in quite those terms, especially at this phase in her career and at a time when leaders and spokeswomen for national organizations were commonly disparaged publicly for allowing their club activities to divert “[their] attention from their domestic responsibilities,” but her actions clearly set her apart.12
A year earlier, she had transitioned from volunteering in the public defender’s office to the role of legal advisor for several women’s clubs, most notably the Women’s Legislative Council, an organization claiming to represent 187,000 female California voters through its affiliation with state branches of the WCTU, LWV, and many other groups.13 Focused on issues in California, the Women’s Legislative Council fought to put women on an equal footing with men beyond voting rights, most notably with the Community Property Law, which the legislature passed in the spring of 1919.14 The version signed into law by the governor was a pale imitation of initial proposals, which would have granted wives rights equal to their husbands’ in all decisions affecting a couple’s community property. Hostile legislators winnowed it down, though one still complained, “These bills originated among foolish and ignorant persons who thought they would please women by passing them. Subservient males listened to the call.”15 As passed, the Community Property Law provided a woman with testamentary rights, including the right to bequeath her half of the community property to whomever she designated, so long as her husband approved, though she was permitted to bequeath her share to her children without permission.16 The same rule applied to the husband, preventing him from willing his half of the community property to anyone other than his wife without her consent.17
The new law had generated a violent backlash from the business community, thoroughly upsetting merchants, bankers, the Los Angeles Times, and the state bar association, these groups uniting to “Avert Dire Peril,” as one spokesman defined it. Angry men spent the summer and fall of 1919 securing the signatures necessary to force the legislatur
e to prevent enactment of the new law until a ballot initiative was held.18 They succeeded; in late 1919, at almost the same time as the state legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, the Community Property Law was suspended, its fate placed on the ballot for the November 1920 election.
The Community Property Law represented one action of many advanced by the Women’s Legislative Council and their legal counsel, Mabel Willebrandt, toward overturning laws denying a wife’s right to make financial decisions about the money she earned, to build a career, or to protect her valuables, challenging the male’s position as the head of the household in all respects.19 A husband’s domination kept wives in submission, if not in outright jeopardy. Willebrandt had suffered such indignities at the hand of her own husband and had witnessed them in the cases she handled as an assistant public defender. Establishing a woman’s ownership of half of a couple’s assets was a baby step, but a step nonetheless, toward revolutionizing the relationship between husband and wife.
Mabel Willebrandt’s career success and her political beliefs represented a violation of the unspoken code, of the expectations imposed upon her gender, as did the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Although Prohibition, the suffrage movement’s parallel achievement, was one of the main goals of the women’s movement, Willebrandt ignored it, advocating instead for changes she believed would do more good for women. She saw nothing in the destruction of the saloon or the outlawing of liquor that would strike at the foundations of the problem of abusive men and fallen women.20 Little did she know her advocacy for protecting women would bring a spotlight upon her, requiring that she make her position on Prohibition known.
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Pauline Sabin’s decision to seek office as a Republican Party delegate would have been a controversial choice within the women’s movement, whose members debated the merits of remaining nonpartisan versus the benefits of joining a party.21 The choice came freighted with concerns over women’s role in society, feminine identity, and the perceived evils of partisanship. Driven to become involved in the issues of the day and having abandoned meaningless social engagements, which she derisively referred to as the “pink tea parties” of her youth, Pauline made the obvious choice.22 The leadership of the most important women’s organizations had solidified long ago, allowing little upward mobility, nor could she stand before the public in an election, having effectively disqualified herself years earlier by virtue of her divorce.
In 1907, at the age of twenty, Pauline had married an appropriate match, a graduate of Harvard University named J. Hopkins Smith, in a ceremony in the stunning grandeur of Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan; it was a massive affair attended by all the right people. In the following years, she gave birth to two sons, but, by 1914, being the heart of the Smith household was no longer enough for her. Unlike most women in this situation, Pauline had options. She had inherited millions of dollars from her father.* Fabulous wealth gave her the ability to support herself and her sons and, therefore, the ability to divorce Mr. Smith. Had she chosen to devote her time to the women’s movement, she might have begun to ascend the ladder of club leadership. Instead, she had opened an interior design busi-ness.
Of this period in her life, as a single mother and businesswoman, Sabin never wrote, and for good reason. Most Americans conside-red her divorce shameful, an unforgivable disgrace, a sin casting her forever from the Episcopal Church to which she belonged. In wrecking her home, living alone in the big city, and running a business—in defiance of tradition, propriety, and decency—the former Mrs. Smith encapsulated all that was wrong with the moral direction of twentieth-century America. Even in New York, with its high tolerance for deviancy from social norms, a divorcée—actually, any single woman going out to dinner with friends—was subjected to rumors of immoral activities and to labels such as “floozy,” “chippie,” or worse.
Then came Charles H. Sabin, her darling “Charlie.” Twenty years her senior, Charlie gave her the connection of equals for which she had been looking. Their commitment may have been strengthened by the improbable road he himself had traveled. The president of the Guaranty Bank, the nation’s second largest, Charles, a man of astonishing wealth and towering influence, had started his career not in college, but as a clerk, then a teller, then a cashier, and on and on—climbing every rung.23
Married outside of their faiths in December 1916, at the Reformed Church in Bedminster, New Jersey, in front of a few dozen friends and relatives, the power couple then proceeded to take on World War I. Mr. Sabin worked with his fellow titans of Wall Street to raise a billion dollars and more in war bonds. Mrs. Sabin rolled up her sleeves and worked on many committees, with many different women’s groups, sponsoring street fairs and special events to raise money for hospitals and disabled veterans at home, for war refugees and reconstruction abroad. Their personal donations to causes, usually to the Red Cross but also in war bond purchases, were also impressive. While others won the right for women to vote in New York State during the same period, Pauline Sabin’s involvement in the suffrage movement remains unknown; perhaps it was as vigorous as she later claimed.24 Newspaper accounts chronicled her war efforts, but the knowledge gained in how groups of women formed, found leaders, crafted plans and priorities, and created positive outcomes went unreported.
Pauline enrolled herself in the Republican Party in 1918, one year after New York enfranchised its female citizens. The following year she won her first attempt at becoming a member of the Suffolk County Republican Committee. The locals knew Mr. and Mrs. Sabin resided in Manhattan, but their summer estate, recently built, was the county’s largest and most expensive, set into the Shinnecock Hills and featuring an expansive view of the island’s inland waterway, Great Peconic Bay.25 The residents of Southampton had heard of the Sabins’ patriotism during the Great War, some of Pauline’s volunteerism having occurred in the village, but of her declaration of independence from tradition, likely nothing. If her rebellion had not engendered enough press to remain in public memory six years later, if even her peers thought twice of talking indiscreetly about the wife of one of the giants of high finance, if her remarriage had returned her to respectability, the effects seemed clear: Pauline Morton had reinvented herself as Mrs. Charles Sabin.26
Winning her place in the local party’s leadership had required her to gain the support of her neighbors, and specifically those who were enrolled party members, not the general public. Working with small groups played to her strengths; having been raised to be ladylike in all circumstances, to be a thoughtful hostess, she knew how to move gracefully, chat appropriately, and listen carefully as she showed off the elaborate gardens of Bayberry Land—the name she had chosen for her country estate—all while taking mental notes about her guests’ politics.
Making female allies took tact and a readiness to acknowledge the insurgency expressed by so many club women. They intended to make their votes count, a sentiment she could agree with. When the other great female victory, Prohibition, became the topic of conversation, Pauline found common ground in her social stratum’s hope that the Eighteenth Amendment would destroy the saloons clogging the streets of Manhattan; for without saloons, the infamous party hacks of Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party’s corrupt political machine, would be shorn of their preferred venues for soliciting, organizing, and directing the hordes of immigrants’ votes. Club women agreed on the attractiveness of this outcome, either because of an inherent bigotry or because countering the immigrant vote, a vote sold cheaply in saloons, was an important argument used by the women’s movement to convince men to vote for suffrage.
Winning friends among the men required a different approach. In a conversation involving economics, politics, or other subjects regarded as in the male domain, a smart woman knew better than to call into question a man’s reason or judgment, lest he feel antagonized. Men were commonly believed to be the rational gender, contrasted against irrat
ional or emotional women. Subtle questions and suggestions disguised with deference, charm, or sociability prevented the confrontations provoked by some leaders of the women’s movement; such subterfuge was an art designed to establish rapport with male politicians.
A few weeks after the successful fund-raiser at the Hotel Astor, in mid-January 1920, the storm Mrs. Sabin wished to avoid for as long as possible flung itself at Senator James Wadsworth. The League of Women Voters’ New York chapter followed through on its earlier threats. “I don’t like a fight,” said its chairwoman, Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, “but my office leads me to direct the women of this organization against Senator Wadsworth’s re-election. Did he represent the state when he voted ‘No’ on the Federal Prohibition amendment and did he represent them by his votes on the League of Nations and the Peace Treaty?” Vanderlip, a woman Sabin knew because their husbands had worked together, called Wadsworth “obsolete, a thing of the past.” The WCTU joined this anti-Wadsworth campaign, with the statement that the state chapter’s fifty thousand women were “absolutely opposed to his re-election.”27 The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), a male-dominated organization aligned with many of the same church groups as the WCTU, was delighted to back the LWV’s insurrection against “a wet United States Senator” in a state where political commentators believed that a majority of the people agreed with Wadsworth’s opposition to Prohibition, a judgment all the more important because accurate polling data did not exist.28