technology – Empowering women through fiction and history.

If you’ve been reading my books, you know my fiction is set in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I mention a little about my story with San Francisco in my author biography (which you can find by clicking on the About Pages on the menu bar above). San Francisco was the place of both my psychological and literary maturity back in the 1990s.

So why is this blog post about Sacramento? First, parts of Book 2 of the Adele Gossling Mysteries take place in Sacramento. And second, I became interested in Sacramento’s history unexpectedly.

Back when I was writing my Gilded Age family saga, the Waxwood Series, I had a chance to visit Benicia, California, a small coastal town not far from San Francisco. I was so fascinated by the lovely surroundings and the way Benicians took their history seriously that it became an inspiration for the town of Waxwood. I wrote about that here.

What does Benicia have to do with Sacramento? In my research, I found out Benicia was, for a very short time, the state capital before legislators settled on Sacramento. In fact, Sacramento had to fight five cities for the honor of state capital, including Monterey, San Jose, and Benicia.

Photo Credit: Sacramento State Capital building, 1910, postcard, Goeggel & Weidner, Publishers, San Francisco: greghenderson2006/Wikimedia Commons/PD US expired

What Sacramento had to offer might not seem like competition with the charm of coastal towns like Monterey and Benicia. And, in fact, the choice of Sacramento as the state capital was almost incidental and certainly very practical. After moving the capital around five cities within five years, legislators accepted Sacramento’s offer to use their home ground as a state capital — and it stayed there. Not a very exciting story but history is filled with stories that aren’t all that exciting.

What Sacramento had going for it at the turn of the 20th century, however, was something else. It took the Progressive Era ball and ran with it. For example, people were slow to embrace the automobile since its inception in the late 19th century, but in 1900, the first car appeared in Sacramento (for comparison, people started buying cars only when the 1908 Ford Model T made them more affordable.) The first automobile race took place during the California state fair in Sacramento in 1903 (the year the Adele Gossling Mysteries begins). People who have read Book 1 are familiar with the opening of Adele roaring down the main street in her Beaton Roundabout (a fictional car manufacturer) and causing a shock among the town’s Victorian-minded residents. You can bet if it had been Sacramento instead of Arrojo, people wouldn’t have turned a hair!

Another area of progress Sacramento embraced was worker’s rights and free commerce. Tired of the Southern Pacific Railroad domination (a company run by San Francisco giants like Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker), Sacramento politicians allowed the Western Pacific Railroad to build tracks in the city, giving many workers jobs and helping to put a halt to the SPR’s cartel over railroad transportation in the West.

And let’s not forget the women! We know women’s suffrage was a big issue for the progressives and women fought to gain the vote, which they did in 1920. But in Sacramento, as in all of California, women already had the right to vote in 1911. In the years following before the ratification of the 19th Amendment, women in California were already making strides with their vote, such as encouraging Chinese-American women to go to the polls (with the first going in 1912) and putting Native American suffragism on the political agenda.

Sacramento may not be as famous as San Francisco, but if you want to read a bit about life in that city, take a look at A Wordless Death coming out at the end of this month. You can pick up a copy at a special price for preorder here. And how about Book 1? That’s on sale too! Get all the information here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy my novella The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers and you can get it here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Photo Credit: Henry Ford’s first car, a Quadricycle Runabout, 1896, Midcoast Studios, Henry Ford Museum: The Henry Ford/Flickr/CC BY NC ND 2.0

We might see the late 20^th Century onward as the era of phenomenal technical innovation (think: personal computer, wifi, and the internet), but it was really the Gilded Age that started it. As I mentioned in this blog post, the Gilded Age (roughly the last quarter of the 19^th century) moved us into the modern era where the 20^th (and 21^st) centuries took over. Everything was getting a make-over then, including fashion, business, and politics. Technology was no exception.

Although cars didn’t really become popular until they became affordable (when Henry Ford released the Model T in 1908), they’re still probably one of the most earth-shattering of all the technical inventions created in the Gilded Age. When exactly the first car was manufactured is a matter of dispute, though people generally cite Carl Benz (of Mercedes-Benz fame) as being the first to come out with a three-wheeled automobile that ran on gasoline. The contraption was pretty modest, looking almost like a three-wheel bicycle with a fancy leather seat. The car was created in 1879 but didn’t get its first run until 1886.

The idea behind the early automobile can be found really in the word itself (which didn’t come about until 1897). The car was all about the ability to go where you wanted in a vehicle that ran on its own (as opposed to having an animal pull it). This is one reason why early automobiles were first referred to as “horseless carriages”. They were thought of as carriages just like any other (and many early 19^th century ones looked more like carriages and wagons than the cars we know today) except they didn’t need a horse to pull them.

Interestingly, early automobiles didn’t necessarily run on gasoline. Many ran on steam power (using a smilier principle as the steam engine, another new technological innovation of the 19^th century) and some even ran on electricity (hello, hybrid). In fact, early electric cars were often marketed to women (yes, women did drive cars in the early 20^th century, including author Edith Wharton and society etiquette queen, Emily Post) because they were elegant and easy to operate.

One of my favorite films is Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The movie is based on a 1918 book (but takes place earlier) and documents the downfall of a wealthy Midwestern family. The shift from carriages to automobiles figures prominently in the story. Eugene Morgan, an old beau of Amberson matriarch Isabella, is a car manufacturer at a time when they were considered, in the words of Isabella’s son, a “useless nuisance”. In the film, there is a discussion of the automobile at the dinner table one night. The discussion brings out some of the fears people had about cars then, such as the value of exclusive neighborhood properties going down once cars allowed people to travel longer distances. Interestingly, the biggest “nuisance” we would consider with cars today (accidents) isn’t even mentioned, probably because the speed limit in the early 20^th century was less than 20 miles an hour outside city limits. The philosophical speech Morgan delivers about the automobile is that, like it or not, no one could stop this technological innovation from replacing the horse and buggy and, of course, this prediction proved right. By the 1910s, cars outnumbered horse-drawn carriages in many cities across America.

Photo Credit: Baker Electric Coupe 1908, taken by Lars-Göran Lindgren: Lglswe/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY SA 3.0

The Alderdices are, like the Ambersons, stuck in the past and are reluctant to embrace the new technologies that were already coming their way in the last decade of the 19^th century. In Book 2, Jake and Vivian is introduced to a custom-made car belonging to Stevens called the Brata. The name is fictional but the car itself was inspired by a real electric car manufactured by the Baker Motor Vehicle Company in 1909. The car attracted me and fit Stevens’ character, like the kind of car he would really own, so I adopted it, although the series takes place some ten years earlier. Interestingly, Jay Leno, a classic car enthusiast, restored one of the Baker Electric 1909 automobiles and you can see him driving it here.

Incidentally, cars also play a role in my upcoming historical cozy mystery series, The Paper Chase Mysteries. The protagonist and amateur sleuth, Adele Gossling, an up-and-coming New Woman, symbolically and literally invades the backward-thinking town of Arrojo in Book 1 when she shows up in a Beaton Roundabout (another fictional name for an automobile but inspired by the Stearns Steam Surrey, manufactured by the Stearns Steam Carriage Company in Syracuse, New York in 1902). If you’re curious, you can find a photo of the car here.

The Waxwood Series is about to get a complete makeover! All four books will be getting new covers and new blurbs in November. You can find out more about the series here.

Come join me for a peek into the corners of history! Curious about those nooks and crannies you can’t find in the history books? Are you more a people lover than a date or event lover when it comes to history? Then you’ll love the Resilient History Newsletter! Plus, when you sign up, you’ll get a prequel to my Waxwood Series for free! Here’s where you can sign up.

Tag: technology

Technology, Railroads, and Women: Sacramento During the Progressive Era

Gilded Age Technical Innovations: The Automobile