The Ladies' Early Advantage

Women were scarce in gold rush-era California—a mere 8 per cent of the state-wide population—when the first federal census took place in 1850. Ten years later, the female portion of the population had only increased to 30 per cent. This scarcity added immeasurably to every woman’s perceived value in society, regardless of her physical attractiveness or temperament, or whether she was married or single.

Actually, the lopsided male-female ratio situation predated the gold rush. During the 1840s, overlanders in covered wagons brought families, but wagon companies always had more men than women, additional men hired to drive extra family wagons, or as outriders to help protect the train through dangerous regions. Early in the decade, fur trapping parties came west, sailors deserted ships, young adventurers—always male, wandered in and decided to settle, or came as employees of shipping interests on the Pacific Coast. A few months before the gold discovery on January 24, 1848, the ratio was further imbalanced with the infusion of several hundred American military personnel, stationed in California during and after the Mexican-American War, to keep the peace until the United States acquired the territory by treaty. 

By May, 1848, a deluge of treasure hunters from around the Pacific Rim swarmed into California, and the next year was even bigger. A few “greybeards” traveled with their wives, sons, and marriable daughters; however, the tens of thousands of men who arrived in 1849, then and evermore dubbed the ‘49ers—the first wave of Americans and Europeans—were mostly younger than thirty. Many were married, but left their women at home. Bedazzled with gold-fevered fantasies, they expected to become very rich very soon, then return home to start a business, buy a bigger farm, or—the ultimate in wild dreams, to live a life of leisure.

About 40 percent of the ‘49ers came by ship. The San Francisco harbormaster counted more than 41,000 Americans and foreigners who disembarked there in 1849—of which just 599 were women.

In September 1849—in anticipation of statehood—delegates from all over California met in Monterey to draft a constitution. Every man at this conference knew the state-to-be was short of women, a situation they tried their best to remedy, by inserting a clause that allowed married women to own property separate from their husbands. This, they hoped, would attract more marriageable ladies. 

It didn’t, not right away.

In fact, it was said that some lonesome gold-rushers traveled for miles just to hear a woman’s voice; and certainly, many were willing to pay a premium for a woman’s cooking. Among the ‘49ers were overlanders Luzena Stanley Wilson and her husband, who stopped to rest outside the new city of Sacramento. The night before they entered the city, a man came into their camp and offered Luzena $5.00 for some biscuits she had just made. When sheer astonishment at being offered what she considered a small fortune for mere biscuits made her hesitate—he doubled his offer, pressing $10.00 in gold dust into her palm for “bread made by a woman.” Still agog, Luzena sold the biscuits and made another batch for her family. 

The Wilsons settled for a while in Sacramento, establishing a boarding house where Luzena did the cooking and serving. The men who ate at her table every day were a motley crowd of gold prospectors, enterprising young merchants, and roaming adventurers; but all of them treated her with courtly courtesy and esteem. “Deference and respect were as readily and as heartily tendered to me as if I had been a queen,” Luzena wrote in her memoirs. “I was a queen.”

In 1851, a year after statehood, the legislature enacted a formal divorce statute. It was strictly fault-based: marriage, in the 19th century, was viewed through a stringent lens of gender roles and morality. The grounds were adultery, cruelty, and desertion, specific wrongdoings; and although the statute was not gender-neutral, it was a divorce law that was more favorable to women, especially when compared to the restrictions—some quite severe—in many of the older American states.

Of course, a divorced woman was free to marry another man, but still, the shortage of females also meant that many single men, who elected to stay in California after they abandoned prospecting for other occupational pursuits, were unable to find wives. The fellows who did have a wife but were perceived as mistreating her, drew stern disapproval from other men.

In October 1859, the editor of the Sacramento Daily Union took it upon himself to scold an unnamed husband for ignoring his lady. This man, said the editor, took his wife to the theater in San Francisco, but near the close of the play, left her sitting there to step outside with his pocket flask. Outside, he joined a group of other men similarly engaged. The husband and his new friends got into a discussion of politics, time passed, the theater closed, and the abandoned wife was forced to find another gentleman to escort her out of the theater—and one who happened to be a very handsome fellow.

“The escort was polite enough to yield up the wife to her husband—a better fortune than the latter deserved after such marked neglect,” said the editor, clearly disgusted at the husband's behavior.

March is National Women's History Month