Lavinia Gertrude Waterhouse
A physician practicing during California’s Gold Rush who was also a Spiritualist, businesswoman, and leading Sacramento suffragist. When Sacramento officials denied her the vote, she sued the city on the grounds that as a taxpaying citizen, she had the right to decide how those taxes were spent. Through her practice as a physician and midwife, Waterhouse began writing letters to the Sacramento papers arguing for voting and economic rights and composing pro-suffrage poetry for the leading feminist papers of the time while also painting pictures based on women’s rights themes. Upon her death in 1890, she bequeathed all her property to the building of a retirement home for elderly women, a final act of consideration capping a life of frontier empathy and devotion.