Beverly Fitch McCarthy: Her Life. Her Legacy.

When I think of Beve, I think of her smile. I never saw her without it. She was always upbeat. She always had something interesting to say and attended a lot of events just to learn something new. 

Beyond her civic service on the Stockton City Council and Stockton Unified School Board, Beve was as engaged in Stockton as much as anyone I knew. What I most appreciated about her membership in so many organizations was that she was all in. She didn’t join in name only. 

She’ll be most remembered for her work on behalf of women. When she married John McCarthy in 1973, she was all over the map in terms of commitment to causes, and he finally said, “Beve, what is most important to you?” No one had ever asked her that question and she realized working on women’s rights was what mattered the most. 

Not that she hadn’t been doing that already. While a student at UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a degree in physical education, she petitioned the student council to integrate the men’s and women’s rooting sections at Cal football games. 

“The men sat on the 50-yard line and we sat to the left of them,” Beve once said “After the halftime show, they’d throw their flash cards and those cards would hit us. So, I went to the student council, and I proposed the men’s and women’s rooting sections be integrated. Oh, my God. It’s Berkeley. It was a mild earthquake. You’d have thought it was World War III. I got on the front page of the Daily Cal. Of course, now it’s integrated, but my motion went down.” 

Undaunted, Beve kept up the good fight. As a physical education teacher and counselor at Delta College, she started the school’s re-entry program. A colleague asked, “Where are they returning from?” Beve understood there were older folks out there who hadn’t been to a school in a while and needed to feel welcome. She also helped establish the child development center, so parents could attend classes and leave their children in a safe place. 

Beve started the Commission on the Status of Women in San Joaquin County and established the Susan B. Anthony Awards to honor achievements of women. 

She loved the arts. She organized trips to other museums through the Haggin Museum and was a member of the Opera Guild and supported the Stockton Symphony. She was a loyal member of the Philomathean Club, American Association of University Women and the Good Time Gals, an informal group that got together once a month for an outing. 

It took until 2019 for Beve to be honored as Stocktonian of the Year. I asked once about nominating her myself and someone told me she was “too controversial.” She’d have loved that. Beve didn’t set out to offend anyone with her work. She just had a vision of what was right, and she didn’t care if she made waves. 

Stockton lost an amazing woman with the passing of Beve. I lost a friend and teacher, someone who showed me what commitment and selflessness look like. 

Beve made Stockton, and me, better with her presence.

By: Lori Gilbert

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The passing of Beverly Fitch McCarthy on December 23, 2021, just a day before Christmas Eve, left a void. In so many ways we thought she would live forever. Yet her mentorship of others and institutional launch of women’s programs secure continuation of her decades-long vision to equal rights for women. Her life’s work still lives in our hearts, minds and hopefully our actions. She is still with us.

Beve was one of the first to publicly call for organized movement and actions on behalf of women. All women in our city. Inspired by Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and the suffragists of the 19th and 20th centuries, she wrapped her convictions boldly in a suffragist’s sash of purple and yellow. Before the pandemic took hold, she was planning for a parade, a march to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, women gaining the right to vote. That parade never transpired, but women voted in record numbers. 

Beve was a rare woman of faith and friendship, of humor, hats and humility; Beve was a woman for our time. A critical time. Her sacrifices were shared with grace alongside her family, who danced with her as she worked generously and vigorously to make life a better place for so many and did so without hesitation or conditions. She challenged us, she helped us define our purpose and led authentically. 

She passionately bound her love of music, theatre and the arts and sang with her own voice, her own vision. She freely owned feminism, and when she proudly stated, “I am a feminist,” you felt the pride she had for her causes, for women. Because they were our causes too. She composed her own symphony of wise determination so that those waves of change could swell, crescendo. Solicit a standing ovation of unified equity for all. 

Her smile was infectious, her laugh was gingerly sweet and her will was indominable. She sat within seats of power, of position and rank without pretense and used those moments as vehicles for escalation of transformation, of redirecting the winds. Her pulpits were opportunities for lessons, for remembering the sacrifices of those women who came before us, for being ever vigilant in the face of ceaseless adversity and fervent controversy. Beve did not want women’s rights to be an inkblot in our history. A lover of learning, her bond to Philomathean sisterhood was ever present and never broken. Her life’s work will become history, archived in a bound and timeless place. 

I remember sitting alongside her in her beloved garden at Mac Manor, guarded and protected by the life-sized statue of the goddess, Athena. It’s a place where her vision of womankind is not dormant but growing and reaching toward brighter skies, toward constitutional heavens where there is a pen ready to sign the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which states: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any states or by any state on account of sex. 

And with our own time on this earth, Beve would insist on keeping that garden growing. Uplifting it, modulating it and refining it so all women might be emboldened and bettered by its earth. →

View Unstoppable Beverly Fitch McCarthy, a video produced by Barbara Daly @Daly Video: https://youtu.be/7AF5nvfLjLo

By: Kristen Birtwhistle

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Remembering Beve

I was a friend of Beverly McCarthy for over 35 years and shared many wonderful times, including spending evenings with our husbands in each other’s homes or having lunch with Doug Wilhoit at the Stockton Country Club. 

My husband, Bill, and I attended Beve’s super birthday party at the Haggin Museum, an event during which she talked about her college years and her life as a feminist. She promised to teach me to play bridge, but whenever we met for my lesson, we got sidetracked by talking about women’s rights and the conditions of the world, so I never learned the game. 

We spent many hours on the phone, too. Beverly founded the San Joaquin County Commission on the Status of Women in 1974, first named the Women’s Council of San Joaquin Commission; she wanted the commission to be recognized by our local city and county officials. That never came to pass, but she worked on making that happen until her death. 

I am the longest active person to have served with Beverly on the commission, so I think that gives me some credibility to say that the annual Susan B. Anthony Banquet is not the sole goal of the commission. Beverly envisioned the role of the commission to expand the civil rights of women and we need to embrace her vision and her legacy that will live on through us!

By: Occeletta Briggs