For more than ninety minutes, Maria stood on the seat of her car in the plaza, pelting passersby with her “votes for women” message. She wasn’t the only woman in America to create a spectacle for the purpose of the suffrage cause. But she was the first to do it in Spanish.[1]
“Maria.” People whispered to each other, pointing at the woman they recognized with her broad-brimmed hat and the vehicle festooned with yellow buntings.
Maria Guadalupe Evangelina de Lopez grew up surrounded by the farmland and orange groves of the burgeoning San Gabriel Valley. Her father, a Mexican immigrant who worked as a blacksmith, purchased an adobe house on the grounds of the San Gabriel Mission, a structure that still stands today.[2]
De Lopez often went by the nickname Lupe, and she, too, was a new kind of woman. Her hair didn’t cascade adventurously down her shoulders like a Gibson girl, no, but Maria was smart, racking up degrees and becoming (likely) the first-ever Latina professor at UCLA. The Spanish Department she taught in eventually enrolled more than 650 students, and she worked as a translator and teacher, expertly switching between the multiple languages she mastered.[3]
She did other things few women of her time would have dared to undertake. Not only was she going to college and driving a car, she was traveling abroad. Alone. And then offering public lectures about what it was like to traverse the Andes.
When her father died in 1904, Maria moved back to the long, narrow adobe house she had grown up in, the bells of the mission and the smell of orange blossoms welcoming her home. She opened her house to her students, hosting holiday teas in Spanish that recreated what life was like on a California mission in the nineteenth century and inviting students to board with her.
Unlike what you might have learned in your elementary school textbooks, North America was not settled only by British colonists in places like Massachusetts and Virginia. Spain and France were all up in North America’s grill, and while the British subjects were still arguing about whether they should kick King George to the curb, missions were being built in what would become the states of California and Texas. The San Gabriel Mission was founded in 1771. Yes, before the ultimate breakup letter declaring American independence was sent across the Atlantic to despotic King George III.
And of course, that is not even counting the indigenous communities that lived in North America for many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. There are Pueblo ruins in New Mexico that are a thousand years old. Well-organized civilizations existed here long before anyone settled New Amsterdam or Jamestown or even before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
To prove the point that North America didn’t need to be discovered by Columbus because people already lived here, a Native American man named Adam Fortunate Eagle flew to an international event taking place in Italy. In preparation for his trip, he began to research the “discovery” of Italy, much like American students learn of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. But he found there was no such myth, no tale of a heroic aha moment on the part of an explorer.
Fortunate Eagle reasoned the same should be true of North America. What right did Columbus have to discover a place that was already occupied? So when he got off the plane in Italy, he was dressed in his full Native American regalia, carrying a spear (it was the 1970s; spears were allowed on planes). At a press conference he said facetiously that he was extremely excited to have discovered this land called Italy, and that he was establishing a government agency to oversee his discovery.[4]
The Italians got it. They took the joke, and Fortunate Eagle was invited to meet the pope. When the pope held up his ring so Fortunate Eagle could kiss it, Fortunate Eagle held out his hand instead, his finger heavy with a ring made from American turquoise. I imagine what was happening in their minds as they held out their hands to each other.
“You may kiss my ring.”
“No, you can kiss MY ring.”
“I am not kissing your ring, I am the pope.”
“Well, I’m not kissing your ring, I just discovered Italy.”
Eventually, the men smiled and shook hands instead, each side refusing to do any smooching. But the point was made: Adam Fortunate Eagle was featured in the international news with his “America did not need to be discovered by Europeans, it was already occupied” message.
Maria was a club woman. And yes, that means she went to club meetings. The women’s club movement began in the nineteenth century and flourished in the early twentieth, as women sought community, education, and organization. Clubs existed for a variety of purposes, but often they were involved in some kind of civic engagement or community service. It was the club women of Southern California who helped establish a juvenile court system and raised awareness and funds to hire probation officers. It was the club women who helped organize kindergartens and playgrounds. It was the club women who fought for labor laws, and it was the club women who organized for women’s suffrage.[5]
Maria was in at least six clubs and was the president of at least one of them. She helped organize a group of female professors and worked to help elect the first female president of the California Teachers Association. It was Maria who was out there festooning her automobile and passing out pamphlets that had suffrage information written in Spanish. “POR QUE?” the pamphlet quizzed. “Why must women have to wait for suffrage?” The answer the pamphlet gave was:
WOMEN Need It.
MEN Need It.
The STATE Needs It.
Women Ought to GIVE Their Help.
Men Ought to HAVE Their Help.
The State Ought to USE Their Help.[6]
In August 1911, an article written by Maria appeared in the Los Angeles Herald. There’s a large photograph of her that accompanies the article: her hair is parted in the middle and pulled back, her cheeks are full, a slight smile on her lips.
In it, she says, “A democracy, we have been taught for many a year, is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What is a man?” she asks. “A man is a person. What is a person? A person is a human being—a person has a soul. Is woman a human being? Yes, a woman is a human being. Has woman a soul?” she asks. “Yes, woman has a soul.”[7]
She goes on to lay out her case that men and women are equal, because they are both human beings. We can’t have a democracy without men, and we can’t have a democracy without half of the democracy’s citizens—women, she says.
While Maria loved teaching Spanish, things were happening on the other side of the world, and she couldn’t resist the siren song of adventure and service. Rather than sitting home and watching news reports about the war unfolding in Europe, Maria decided she would do something, packing her belongings and boarding a train for New York.
In New York, she learned how to be an ambulance mechanic, with Los Angeles newspapers reporting that she had passed her mechanic exams with a grade of 95.[8] (I know, cue the shocked menfolk: “I never realized it was possible for women to do complex things!”) She even began learning to fly airplanes.
On May 26, 1917, the Los Angeles Times ran a picture of her and an article that read: “Ambitious. From Schools to Trenches. Los Angeles Girl soon will leave for France. Former teacher here passes ambulance tests. Hopes also to complete her aviation studies. Noted local teacher to go to war.”
Maria said, “It’s just a chance whether I will ever return, but I am ready and willing to make the sacrifice for my country. I have no one depending on me, and my country needs me, so I must go. The idea of flying and of going to France thrills me. The call cannot come too soon, even if before I have finished my course in flying. I am anxious to be giving my services and to be doing something for my country.”[9]
Maria went to France, likely sometime in 1918. A number of famous men, like Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway, served in the same capacity as Maria—ambulance drivers in World War I.
Walt Disney was too young to enlist like his older brothers, so he altered his own birth certificate to make himself eligible to drive an ambulance for the Red Cross in France. At the time, you only had to be seventeen for ambulance service, whereas you had to be eighteen for military service. Walt missed shipping out with his unit because he became very ill as the worldwide flu pandemic raged.[10] He was so sick that the doctors at the ambulance driver training program said that if he had any hope of making it, he needed to go home, because if he stayed with all the other sick people, he would surely die.
Walt was carried up the steps of his home on a stretcher, where his family nursed him back to health, and he was eventually able to leave for France. He sailed on a converted cattle ship, and recalled the journey as most unpleasant—turns out that crossing the Atlantic on a ship made for cows is not a first-class voyage.
While in France, he worked on his artistic skills, painting helmets for Americans who were heading home. He would paint realistic bullet holes, enabling soldiers to make it seem that they had killed a German and taken his helmet as a prize. Walt then sent much of the money he earned back to his family.[11]
At the outset of WWI, the U.S. military was quite small compared to other countries of similar size. The government partnered with the Red Cross to provide ambulance services, one of the many public-private partnerships it undertook during the war. Eventually, the United States stopped recruiting men to work in the ambulance motor corps and instead drafted them into regular military service. This helped create the opportunity for women to serve overseas in roles other than that of nurse.
After Maria arrived, she received her duty assignment at a hospital that was run by women. The United States refused to allow women who were trained physicians to serve in WWI. There were roughly eighty female doctors who were like, “I would like to serve, please send me,” and the United States essentially said, “No, thanks anyway.”[12]
So what did the women doctors do? Sit back and complain that the government was allowing soldiers to suffer instead of using the willing and able services of trained surgeons? No. They fundraised to go on their own. They got donations from wealthy women who sponsored them, they organized and worked, and they paid their own way. The National American Woman Suffrage Association even used its funds to pay for a hospital facility in France, although they changed the name, removing any reference to suffrage because they knew that it may not be popular with antisuffrage activists. When they got to France, France was like, “Yes, please, we will take all the help we can get—if you are a surgeon, we don’t care what gender you are.”
Ambulance drivers had to be qualified mechanics (often the vehicle of choice was a retrofitted Model T), because there was no garage to just drop your ambulance off at should something go wrong. Women like Maria had to be willing to dodge bombs and men with machine guns. They had to know enough first aid to stabilize a patient before they were loaded into the ambulance and brought back to the hospital. They had to be okay with seeing arms blown off and shrapnel that gravely disfigured a face. They had to be willing to be alone on a road that was likely in horrible condition, trying not to fall into car-size potholes, making their way across bridges weakened by warfare, all without street signs.
When Maria arrived at her duty station in France, the ambulances had not yet made it, so she was assigned an alternate job in the interim working for the French government, finding herself stationed in an old château, its once stately rooms filled with wounded soldiers. Not long after her arrival, Maria heard her first booms of warfare, the château shaken by German bombardment. On and on the bombing continued, lighting fire to the building, chunks of plaster raining down from the ceilings.
