March is Women’s History Month and the Glen Park News is pleased to reprint this piece of Glen Park women’s history from the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project newsletter by founder and director Evelyn Rose.
Our jaws dropped upon making the discovery. Johanna Pinther, a resident of Glen Park over a century ago, is featured in an image on the cover of three books about California suffrage.[1-3] The photograph, first appearing on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on August 28, 1908, is iconic[4]: three well-dressed women marching shoulder-to-shoulder with dignity and determination. Johanna is on the right. In the center dressed all in white is her step-daughter-in-law, Jeanette Wall Pinther of Noe Valley in San Francisco. Jeanette is carrying the banner of the California Equal Suffrage Association, handsewn and hand-embroidered by Johanna herself. On the left is Lillian Harris Coffin, a resident of Mill Valley in Marin County.
While the source of this postcard image at the California Historical Society correctly identifies the women, the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project is the first to identify Johanna as a Glen Park resident.