Woman Suffrage in Oregon

by Kimberly Jensen

The campaign to achieve voting rights (also called suffrage or the franchise) for Oregon women from 1870 to 1912 is part of a broad and continuing movement at the regional, national, and international levels to secure equality and full citizenship for women. Oregon has the distinction of placing the question of votes for women on the ballot six times—in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, 1910, and 1912—more than any other state.

The national suffrage campaign spanned the years from the women’s rights convention held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, to the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920. Western states and territories saw most of the earliest victories for woman suffrage (Wyoming, 1869, 1890; Utah, 1870, lost 1887, regained 1896; Colorado, 1893; Idaho, 1896; Washington, 1883, lost 1887, regained 1910; California, 1911; Oregon and Arizona, 1912; Alaska Territory, 1913; Nevada, 1914). This was due in part to territorial and statehood politics and to the support of political groups such as the Populists and Progressives.

Oregon’s woman suffrage activities were tied to the regional and national movement: national and regional leaders visited Oregon to organize and support the work, and Oregon suffragists visited other states to assist them with campaigns. Yet, as with other measures, race and ethnicity were often barriers to the vote for Oregon women.

The history of the woman suffrage movement in Oregon falls into three distinct phases. The first phase, from 1870 to 1900, included early action, organization, and attempts to pass woman suffrage legislation in the state. The second phase included the use of the new Oregon System of initiative and referendum. From 1900 to 1912, a second generation of suffragists built successful coalitions and used modern techniques of mass advertising in the new consumer culture. In a final period, from 1912 to 1920, Oregon suffragists were a part of national suffrage organizations and politics that led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Early Organization and Legislative Attempts, 1870-1900

The question of votes for women first appeared in Oregon, if only briefly, in the debates that took place in the state Constitutional Convention in August and September 1857. Delegates discussed who should have the right to vote and proposed that the right should belong only to white male citizens. David Logan of Multnomah County moved “to strike out male before citizen,” but his motion lost, apparently without debate. What emerged was a state constitution that made voting a privilege for white men only and prevented all women and all men of color from exercising that right, with specific prohibitions against African Americans, Chinese Americans, and those of mixed heritage or “mulattos.” Woman suffrage in Oregon was tied to questions of race and ethnicity from the beginning.

The movement for woman suffrage in Oregon began in Salem and Albany in 1870, when local equal suffrage associations organized with both women and men as members. Building on the momentum generated by national leader Susan B. Anthony’s Pacific Northwest speaking tour in 1871, supporters formed the Oregon Woman Suffrage Association in 1873. Oregon women joined in the strategy known nationally as the “New Departure” to claim voting rights under the 14th and 15th amendments following the Civil War (the U.S. Supreme Court struck down these claims in Minor v. Happersett in 1875).

In October 1872, Oregon suffragists petitioned the state legislature to pass a statute “instructing judges to receive and count the votes of women in their various precincts in the coming November election” and held a mass meeting in Salem. Four Portland women—Abigail Scott Duniway, Maria Hendee, Mrs. M.A. Lambert, and Mrs. Beatty, an African American—joined Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Minor, and other women across the nation who attempted to vote in the November presidential election. The election judge in Oregon accepted the four women’s ballots but put them “under the [ballot box] and not inside.” Even though they were not counted, these first votes were important symbols that linked the claims of Oregon women with those of other activists around the country.

Some Oregon women gained the right to vote in school elections as a step toward broader access to the franchise, a goal for which women in other states were also campaigning. In 1862, Oregon lawmakers had granted the vote in school elections to “women who are widows, and have children and taxable property in the district.” Women could vote because of their particular relationship to men and families, not because they had an individual right to cast a ballot.

An 1878 statute provided that citizens who had property, who were older than twenty-one, and who had lived thirty days or more in the district “upon which he or she pays a tax” could cast a vote in school elections. While this statute removed marital status as a requirement, many Oregon women continued to be excluded from voting because of legal barriers to holding property based on race and ethnicity; others were excluded based on economic status. Even this limited right to vote was vulnerable. When election judges prevented Eugene women from voting in local school elections in March 1897, suffragist Laura Harris sued the judges. In Harris v. Burr (1898), the Oregon Supreme Court upheld the right of taxpaying women to school suffrage.

In this early period, Abigail Scott Duniway took the lead in Oregon’s campaign for the franchise. Like many early suffrage leaders in western states, Duniway was a journalist, and she used her newspaper, the New Northwest (1871-1887), to publicize the cause and to build networks with news items, letters, and opinions from local and national readers. She also attended national suffrage conventions and went on speaking tours. Duniway viewed the vote as part of a broad campaign to achieve equal economic and social rights for women.

Suffragists had to find a way to persuade male voters to support the franchise for women, and Duniway believed that the best strategy was what she termed the “still hunt” —a behind-the-scenes campaign with influential people that would not arouse public interest or opposition. As the movement progressed, she came into conflict with local and national leaders who believed that open campaigns with active grassroots associations and coalition building were the most effective means to achieve the vote.

Most historians see Duniway as a gifted journalist and orator who built important momentum for the cause, but many also point to her shortcomings as an ineffective organizer who had difficulty dealing with people. One key conflict emerged between Duniway and members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), who supported woman suffrage as a way to enact legislative limits on alcohol. By the 1884 campaign, Duniway had come to believe that supporters of prohibition were ruining any chance of suffrage success. She feared that male voters and well-financed brewing and liquor interests would equate the women’s vote with prohibition and kill any suffrage statute. Members of the WCTU were an important suffrage constituency in Oregon and the nation, and Duniway came to emphasize the problems with prohibition to such an extent that it became one of the signal problems of her campaign. She alienated supporters, engaged in a public and acrimonious argument with national leaders, and diminished the possibility of coalition building.

Any change to the state constitution required that a bill pass both houses of the state legislature in two successive sessions and then be ratified by voters. Members of the legislature debated woman suffrage in the 1872 and 1874 sessions, but the measure did not pass. In 1880, a bill passed the House and Senate and one passed again in 1882, but voters defeated the measure in 1884 with supporters at just 28 percent.

Suffrage activists got another bill passed in 1895, but the Oregon House in 1897 did not organize due to factional disputes. The 1899 legislature passed the measure, but voters defeated woman suffrage on the ballot in 1900, this time with 48 percent of voters in support. Because of these challenges, most suffragists were eager to see the initiative and referendum passed so they could put the measure directly before the voters on the ballot.

The Progressive Era and a Second Generation of Suffragists, 1900-1912

After the state’s 1902 adoption of the initiative and referendum system and with plans being made for the Lewis and Clark Exposition and Oriental Fair in 1905, Oregon suffragists lobbied successfully to have the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) hold its convention in Portland. The convention in the summer of 1905 was an impressive success. Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, and other well-known suffragists gave stirring speeches, and national leaders agreed to assist with a strategic campaign for the 1906 Oregon election. With public support from many of Oregon’s political leaders, including Mayor Harry Lane and Governor George Chamberlain, Oregon’s suffrage movement became visible and popular. This energized local efforts, raised the number of suffrage groups to some fifty around the state, and brought national attention and support to the Oregon cause.

Oregon’s 1906 campaign was one of the first to use the tactics of the modern suffrage movement. Local groups conducted strong grassroots organizing, with speeches, meetings, advertising, and the distribution of suffrage literature. NAWSA contributed $18,000 to the effort, and President Anna Howard Shaw and other national organizers were in Oregon for the campaign. Clara Colby came to Portland to publish her Woman’s Tribune, a national suffrage weekly newspaper.

Despite all these efforts, the 1906 campaign met with defeat. Liquor and business interests used the press, public relations, and dollars to oppose the measure. There were also internal conflicts, particularly between Abigail Scott Duniway and national leaders, and many local suffragists distanced themselves from Duniway after the campaign.

The 1906 measure received 44 percent support, and a subsequent measure in 1908 gained just 39 percent. In 1910, Duniway put forward a taxpayers’ equal suffrage initiative that stated: “no citizen who is a taxpayer shall be denied the right to vote on account of sex.” Many progressives and wage earners opposed the measure as class-based legislation that privileged women who were property holders. Support for suffrage in the election dropped to 37 percent.

Across the state, suffragists regrouped for the campaign of 1912. Historians attribute the success of the campaign to a number of factors. One was Oregon’s “local grievance.” Because of the successful campaigns in Washington (1910) and California (1911), Oregon was now surrounded by states that had granted suffrage to women, and suffrage workers appealed to state pride.

Another factor was successful coalition building. There were about seventy groups across the state and twenty-three in Portland alone, including neighborhood groups, the Men’s Equal Suffrage League of Multnomah County, a Chinese American equal suffrage league, and a league representing African American suffragists, headed by Hattie Redmond and Katherine Gray. The Portland Woman’s Club Suffrage Campaign Committee, led by Sara Evans, Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Elizabeth Eggert, and Grace Watt Ross, helped coordinate work with national and regional leaders in NAWSA and a visit by Anna Howard Shaw. Lovejoy formed Everybody’s Equal Suffrage League with a particular goal of including wage-earning women in the cause. In addition, Abigail Scott Duniway was ill for most of the campaign, which meant that other groups and leaders could take on a stronger role. Like their successful colleagues in Washington and California, Oregon suffrage workers again used techniques designed to appeal to a new consumer and mass media culture, including advertisements, leaflets, theater presentations, and mass meetings. In November 1912, Oregon voters approved woman suffrage by 52 percent. On November 30, as a symbol of her long suffrage legacy, Abigail Scott Duniway wrote and signed Oregon’s Equal Suffrage Proclamation at the request of Governor Oswald West.

The success of the 1912 campaign, which removed the word “male” from voting privileges outlined in the Oregon constitution, did not mean that all Oregon women could vote. First-generation women (and men) who migrated from Asia were prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens and could not cast a ballot. Native American women, except those married to white men, were also ineligible for U.S. citizenship until federal legislation in 1924. Racial and ethnic barriers to citizenship and voting persisted.

Oregon and National Suffrage Movements, 1912-1920

Enfranchised women in Oregon and other western states faced particular dilemmas as national organizations debated strategies for achieving national woman suffrage. After the 1912 campaign, many women in Oregon continued the work by assisting with other state campaigns and pushing for a federal suffrage amendment. Some remained part of NAWSA, and others joined a new group, the Congressional Union (CU), later called the National Woman’s Party. In 1914, leaders of the CU announced that they would hold the Democratic Party, then in power in Congress and the White House, responsible for the failure of a national suffrage amendment. They sent organizers to states where women could vote to lobby against Democratic candidates. In Oregon, this meant opposing Senator George Chamberlain, a staunch supporter of woman suffrage and an ally of NAWSA activists.

Dr. Esther Lovejoy, Sara Evans, Millie Trumbull, and other NAWSA supporters were deeply offended by this policy because it went against their own careful coalition-building in Oregon politics. But CU supporters in Oregon, including Mary Cachot Therkelsen, Dr. Florence Sharp Manion, and Clara Wold, believed that the strategy was the only way to move the federal suffrage amendment to a vote. Senator Chamberlain won re-election in 1914, and the issue caused a division among Oregon women suffragists from 1914 to 1919.

Suffrage supporters in both groups put aside many of their differences to work for the ratification of the federal suffrage amendment in Oregon. Activists hoped to make the state one of the first to ratify the amendment in 1919 as a show of support for votes for all women and as a tribute to the state’s pioneering role in the effort. But they, with other western state supporters, encountered resistance that delayed the ratification process. The U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. Thirty-six state legislatures then had to ratify the amendment to place it in the federal constitution. That June, Oregon’s biennial legislative session had been adjourned for over three months. Governor Ben Olcott opposed a special session and would only consider one if Oregon’s participation was needed to make the difference in ratification or if forty-seven of the ninety members of the Oregon house and senate requested it. They would have to agree to pay all of their own expenses (estimated collectively at $5,000). Local members of the National Woman’s Party (formerly the CU) and NAWSA affiliates put aside their differences to form a ratification committee. They met with legislators and the governor, orchestrated a successful letter-writing campaign, and publicized the cause. They organized regional meetings with senators and representatives, advertised, and sent out press releases. They also coordinated actions with national suffrage leaders, who came to Oregon.

In the end, the ratification committee was unable to secure the pledges of forty-seven legislators, but Governor Olcott decided to call a special session in response to requests from the state industrial accident commission to address worker legislation. During the session, both houses adopted House Joint Resolution 1, introduced by Representative Sylvia Thompson, on January 12, 1920, making Oregon the twenty-fifth state to ratify the 19th Amendment. Thirty-six states ratified the amendment by August 1920, and the U.S. Constitution finally removed sex as a barrier to voting rights. Results of Woman Suffrage in Oregon

The achievement of suffrage in Oregon led to many important developments for women’s full citizenship rights. After suffrage, women sought elective office and worked to create legislation that would improve conditions for women and address women’s equality. Marian B. Towne of Jackson County was the first woman elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1914, and Kathryn Clarke of Glendale won a special election in January 1915 to serve in the Oregon Senate. Two cities had all-female city councils—Umatilla in 1916 and Yoncalla in 1920. Legislation in 1921 granted women the right to sit on juries. Voters approved local option for prohibition in 1914, although some Oregon women, including Nan Wood Honeyman, were involved in the Woman’s Organization for Prohibition Reform, which lobbied to repeal prohibition.

Changes in federal legislation also benefited Oregon women. Sex was included as a prohibited category of discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in Title IX to the Educational Act of 1972, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex under any educational programs or programs receiving federal funds, including sports. Oregon ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1973 and re-ratified it in 1977 as a show of support in the continuing national campaign (the ERA has not yet been ratified). Supporters were not successful in passing a state ERA, but in 1982 Oregon Supreme Court Justice Betty Roberts found in Hewitt v. State Accident Insurance Fund Corporation (SAIF) that Article I, Section 20 of the Oregon Constitution—which states that “no law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges, or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens” —provided equal protection and was, in fact, a state equal rights clause.

Across all three phases of Oregon’s movement for woman suffrage, from nineteenth century early organization and first steps, to Progressive Era activism with new mass media tactics, the use of initiative and referendum, and coalition-building, to the final stages of work for a federal amendment, Oregon suffrage supporters made vital contributions to the achievement of women’s full citizenship. When leaders worked to include constituents across lines of race and ethnicity, they garnered particular success, while barriers to full inclusion held back the achievements for all women. Oregon activists were early participants and helped shape the rest of the nation’s campaign for votes for women. The state’s suffrage history comprises a vital part of the local, regional, national, and international movement for women’s full citizenship that continues today.

Further Reading

Catt, Carrie Chapman, and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969, 343-377.

Duniway, Abigail Scott. Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (2nd ed.). New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

Edwards, G. Thomas. Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990.

Jensen, Kimberly. “‘Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign’: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108: 3 (Fall 2007), 350-383.

Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Moynihan, Ruth Barnes. Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.

Ward, Jean M., and Elaine A. Maveety. “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000.

This essay is reproduced here with permission of The Oregon Encyclopedia.. To learn more go to www.oregonencyclopedia.org. Copyright © 2008-2011 Portland State University

About the Author

Kimberly Jensen teaches history and gender studies at Western Oregon University. Dr. Jensen is the author of Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War and she is writing a biography of Esther Lovejoy.

Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage in Oregon, 1871–1906

By G. Thomas Edwards

Noted national suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony made three important visits to Oregon and has been called the grandmother of Oregon suffrage. In 1871, she and her long-time friend and co-worker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, first visited the West. Traveling from Chicago on the new transcontinental railroad, fifty-one-year-old Anthony and fifty-five-year-old Stanton wanted to meet with women voters in Wyoming and Utah and to advance the woman suffrage effort in Colorado and California. After considerable success, Anthony fell victim to the San Francisco press, having defended a prostitute charged with murder.
With this bitter experience on her mind, Anthony accepted an invitation from Abigail Scott Duniway to push for reform in Oregon and Washington. Duniway had recently established the New Northwest, a weekly newspaper championing woman suffrage and other reforms. In early September, the pair reached a business agreement whereby the Portlander would serve as tour manager and receive one-half the gross receipts of 50-cent ticket sales for the campaigner’s lectures, to be delivered in the Willamette and Walla Walla valleys Puget Sound, and Victoria, British Columbia.

Each of Anthony’s three Portland lectures packed a lecture hall and aroused the community. She began with her standard talk, “Power of the Ballot,” a closely reasoned effort emphasizing that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments actually enfranchised women, that men dominated but did not protect women, and that the condition of women would improve if they voted, because politicians would have to respond to their needs. Anthony assured listeners that women would be responsible voters and office-holders. An editor quoted her as arguing, “women are no more or less than slaves.” Only women could attend her second appearance, in which she discussed personal issues and denounced licensed prostitution.

Her third presentation lasted two and a half hours and included questions from the audience or that she herself posed. To the inevitable question, “Is the Bible against the ballot?” she reminded the crowd that the Bible had been employed to curb scientists and reformers while it also had been used to justify slavery. She rejected the “injunction of the Bible upon women to submit themselves to their husbands.” Anthony reminded listeners that there was a Biblical curse on men — who were to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow — and asserted that ministers and physicians did not sweat much, and she drew laughter by concluding that politicians only sweated before elections. In response to the belief that husbands represented their wives in political matters, Anthony insisted that widows and wives of drunkards lacked representation: “No individual can represent another, as that other would do for himself or herself.”

She declared the ballot would not degrade her sex: “Women would be as refined and pure with power as without it. Good, pure and noble women meet vile men every day; they hold the most intimae family relations with them, being their wives, sisters, and daughters.” If women voted, she was asked, who would lead the family? She bluntly asserted: “Brains will always rule, whether in the head of man or woman.”

Pleased with their Portland effort, Anthony and Duniway began a strenuous two-month campaign during which Anthony traveled over 2,000 miles and delivered 60 speeches in courthouses, fairgrounds, schoolhouses, and churches. Uncomfortable stagecoaches, tasteless meals, and dingy hotels sapped their energy as the famous New Yorker sought to teach the importance of equal suffrage to 91,000 residents of Oregon and 24,000 residents of Washington Territory. The exhaustive campaign ended in late November.

Anthony called the tour a success. She had publicized her reforms, won converts, created four suffrage organizations, and taught Duniway, who explained: “I became quite thoroughly initiated in the movement and made my first efforts at public speaking.”

Significant opinion makers, however, opposed her. Historian Lee Nash reasoned that newspaper editors could not champion change in traditional sex roles. They recognized a “macho norm” that meant men “were expected publicly and visibly to be tough, combative, elemental, insensitive, uncompromising.” Condescending editors often denounced Anthony’s declarations; for example, a Salem editor argued that she wrongfully concluded that men were unfaithful. “We resent the charge, brought by a disappointed and sarcastic woman — neither a wife or mother — against the race of men who are today carrying civilization to its highest point . . . giving woman more privileges than she has ever had.” Another editor claimed: “Voting by ballot is the silent expression of the opinion the citizens, and as no woman — save a deaf and dumb one — ever had a silent opinion upon any question she could not exercise the right of suffrage.”  Influential ministers condemned Anthony as a societal menace.

Twenty-five years later, in 1896, Duniway and other regional suffragists, striving to rejuvenate the suffrage movement, pleaded with Anthony to return. Serving as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association(NAWSA) and currently fighting in California’s noted suffrage campaign, she agreed to a short visit. Demonstrating phenomenal energy during her nine days of leadership in Seattle and Portland, growing cities critical to suffrage victories, Anthony frequently repeated basic points voiced in 187l. But she stressed that with the ballot in their hands, moral women would help resolve urban problems. A Tacoma editor also emphasized women’s morality, pointing out that in 1890, his state had “443 male and only 4 female prisoners.” 

The high point of Anthony’s tour was a well-publicized Woman’s Congress arranged by Portland suffragists. She emphasized equal suffrage, asserted that the ballot would end the pay inequity between men and women, and gratified adherents by stating that their cause was “further advanced in the West because the West contain the more liberal progressive element from the East, and any good cause or measure reform is more readily accepted here.”  Although newspapers often did not embrace equal suffrage, they provided better coverage and did not resort to ridicule.

Disagreements, however, shattered suffrage leadership. In Portland and elsewhere, Anthony heard or read national and local suffrage leaders complain about Duniway’s rigid leadership and blunt language. Thus, the New Yorker informed the Portlander she could not participate in the current Idaho suffrage fight, because NAWSA workers and Idaho women would manage what would be a successful battle. This directive upset Duniway — she had campaigned extensively in Idaho — as did her mentor’s arrangement empowering Portland clubwomen at Duniway’s expense.

The national and state leaders also disagreed over tactics to be used in Oregon’s 1900 referendum fight. Anthony and allies advocated a well-organized, well-publicized campaign. Duniway, however, rejected this traditional approach and argued for a “still hunt,” meaning that she and supporters would quietly work with prominent male leaders. NAWSA stepped aside but closely watched Duniway’s management of the suffrage referendum that narrowly failed. Anthony concluded that the Portlander’s tactics and sharp tongue had botched a great opportunity for Oregon to follow Idaho in becoming the fifth suffrage state. Duniway’s failed campaign and inability to arrange another contest in 1904 convinced Anthony and allies that they must take charge of the 1906 referendum. The NAWSA campaign began in 1905, when the organization sent two New England women to establish grass roots groups across Oregon; more important, it arranged to conduct its national convention in Portland during the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Thus, the organization’s first far west meeting would publicize Anthony, NAWSA, and the forthcoming state referendum.

In June 1905, the eighty-five-year-old Anthony journeyed to Portland, accompanied by her seventy-eight-year-old sister Mary. Although frail, Anthony was determined to help launch a proper Oregon campaign. The sisters took accommodations for fifteen days at the Portland Hotel. NAWSA officials, including president Anna Shaw, joined with state suffrage leaders to maximize Anthony’s skills and reputation. Often called “Aunt Susan,” she held interviews, lectured at the convention, talked at the First Baptist Church’s Sunday service, shook many hands at her reception, and was the featured speaker at the unveiling of the Sacajawea statue. At the reception, she stated, “I don’t expect to be here when you get the vote, but I shall be somewhere in the kingdom, in the universe, and I shall rejoice with you.”  At the crowded church, parishioners applauded her address on “The influence which educational, charitable, and religious associations would have if women possessed the ballot.”  At the convention, she delivered a sweeping political speech, hailing Oregon’s progressive initiative and referendum, advocating an open state-wide fight under female leadership, warning leaders not to align with any political party, and promising improved politics if women voted.

After the convention, Anthony helped Shaw and other notables prepare for the promising campaign. Despite disagreements, including one regarding the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s role in suffrage votes, Anthony and Duniway respected each other.

Anthony pushed her reform in the East, including a disappointing visit with President Theodore Roosevelt. She kept a close eye on the Oregon campaign, donating eighty-six birthday dollars to the fight, and on her deathbed, listened to Shaw read news from distant allies. Both suffragists anticipated that an Oregon victory would trigger similar results in western states. Anthony exclaimed, “Of, if I were only able to go there! I long for it so.” On March 13, 1906, she died of pneumonia and did not learn that men had defeated the suffrage amendment.

Further Reading

Abigail Scott Duniway, Path Breaking, Schoken Books, New York, 1971.

Katleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography, New York University Press, New York 1988.

G. Thomas Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony, Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990

Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety, Yours for Liberty: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper, Oregon State University Press, 2000.

About the Author

G. Thomas Edwards is the William Kirkman Professor of History Emeritus and served at Whitman College from 1964 -1998. Edwards taught classes in American history, especially the Civil War and the American West, receiving several distinguished teaching awards. He is the author of Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony.

Oregon Women’s Clubs

By Karen J. Blair

From the early beginnings of Oregon Territory and then the State of Oregon, women residents demonstrated enthusiasm for forming literary and civic clubs to accomplish self improvement and community reform. Women settlers from eastern locales brought experience in church and secular organizations and transplanted that volunteer activity to the Pacific Northwest. Associational life took hold and flourished, providing women with skills to accomplish institution building for cultural development and social welfare in their communities. Club members also applied their talents to achieve their own political autonomy, in the form of woman suffrage, which was won in 1912 after five failed campaigns for the vote, in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1910.

The Columbia Maternal Association is the earliest woman’s society formed in Oregon Territory (now Walla Walla, Washington). Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, wife of missionary Marcus Whitman, MD, joined with other missionary wives during the 1830s to discuss modern child-raising ideas. As churches of every denomination were established in the region, women in the congregations formed ladies’ aid societies to raise money for charitable endeavors, church needs, and missions abroad. The Civil War of the 1860s, though distant from Oregon settlements, spurred women to form relief societies to provide for soldier needs. One example was the McMinnville Ladies’ Sanitary Aid Society, founded in 1863 to support Union troops by raising hundreds of dollars from sewing, knitting, and extracting financial pledges from local patriots. Wartime contributions alerted women to the roles they might play outside the domestic arena. Taxing as housekeeping and child-raising were on the frontier, women sought to effect greater change outside the home to enhance their communities. Defying the conventional dictum, “woman’s place is in the home,” Oregon’s pioneer women found the time and energy to shape the world in which they lived.

A powerful force for women’s reform of their society was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which was founded back East in the 1870s to diminish alcohol consumption or even abolish its sale altogether in “dry” towns. As women had done in Ohio, Portland women launched assaults on saloons in the belief that drinking triggered social dysfunction, causing domestic violence and straining family relations. Members prayed, sang hymns, and demonstrated in front of the Webfoot Saloon in 1874 to discourage conviviality inside and create awareness about alcohol abuse. Activist efforts were met with attacks by tavern owners. The Brewers’ and Wholesale Liquor Dealers’ Association of Oregon responded by undermining efforts for women’s rights for decades, in the (correct) assumption that voting women would enforce Prohibition. Indeed, immediately after women won the vote in Oregon in 1912, they went to the polls to endorse Prohibition in 1914, years before the nation went dry with the Volstead Act of 1920. The WCTU thrived in Oregon, often in church meeting halls, and held its first state convention in 1883, with 33 unions (669 members) represented. Its heyday, in 1891, saw 83 locals with a membership of 2,000 women. The members expanded their goals well beyond the call for moderate drinking habits. Among the many issues members supported in Oregon were reading rooms for sailors and soldiers on leave, prison reform, juvenile justice, woman suffrage, kindergartens and day-care centers for working mothers, and education about the evils of tobacco, alcohol, and sexual freedom in Sunday schools, prisons, schools, and immigrant communities. They sponsored Florence Crittenton Purity Circles in Pendleton, Grants Pass, Eugene, Roseburg, The Dalles, Oregon City, and McMinnville to fund homes for unwed “fallen women” who needed refuge until they delivered babies who they would give up for adoption.

A staggering range of additional women’s groups arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included benevolent groups such as the Children’s Flower Mission of Portland, created in 1885 as the first day-care center in the city. Mothers clubs eventually developed into the PTA. The Albina district of Portland enjoyed music appreciation instruction as early as the 1890s through the Monday Musical Club. Women formed auxiliaries to fraternal orders, such as the Women’s Degree of Pocahontas associated with the Reformed Order of Redmen. In Portland (1855) and The Dalles (1856), groups named Rebekah’s formed as women’s divisions of the all-men’s Independent Order of Odd Fellows, as did Eastern Star to the Masons and Women of Woodcraft to the Woodmen of the World. Farmers’ wives used the Grange to address common interests. Heritage societies emerged, including the Multnomah Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, forming in 1896. The Native Daughters of Oregon required ancestry from overland trail pioneers who had settled before the advent of the railroad. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Portland women formed a branch of the Red Cross. Mountain climbing attracted women to the co-ed Mazamas Club after 1894 and to the Mountaineers after 1906.

When minority women found themselves unwelcome in groups largely populated with a white, Protestant membership, they formed separate groups. The Lucy Thurman Union, a WCTU branch of African American women in Portland, evolved into the Colored Women’s Council. The African American Woman’s Co-op (later Multnomah Women’s Club), Harriet Tubman Club, and Oregon Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs seeded civic reform as zealously as any clubs in Oregon. Likewise, the Portland branch of the National Association of Jewish Women’s Clubs created a sewing school for 60 to 80 girls, classes in domestic science and manual training, and Neighborhood House, a settlement house (community center) to provide services that eased the transition to American life for immigrants to the city.

Club fever flourished throughout the state. Historian Sandra Haarsager’s research has shown that a town as tiny as The Dalles, with a popular of 3,000 in 1900, boasted twenty women’s organizations, including those at the Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches; in women’s auxiliaries to the Odd Fellows, Masons, and Woodmen of the World; and the WCTU, German Ladies Aid, women’s Relief Corps (auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic), King’s Daughters sewing group, two literary clubs, The Dalles Women’s Club, and Sorosis.

One focus of women’s clubs was the conditions of working women. Sometimes, workers created their own interest groups. Alliances of teachers emerged, such as the Priscilla Club at Western Oregon Normal School. An all-women’s Portland Medical Club united physicians, and the Women’s Card and Label League lobbied for laboring women and for improved working conditions for their husbands. The Portland Women’s Union created an evening school for laboring women and a boarding house (in 1887), providing inexpensive and decent lodging for earners far from home. Of national importance was the research of the Portland branch of the National Consumer’s League (founded 1901), which supported the labor law prohibiting women laundry workers from workdays longer than ten hours. This protection was affirmed by a 1908 Supreme Court decision, Mueller v. Oregon, opening the way for a spate of protective legislation for working women, on the grounds that potential mothers deserved safe conditions of employment. The League conducted a 1912 survey, under Caroline J. Gleason (later Sister Miriam Theresa), that surveyed 8,736 women factory, laundry, and cannery workers; chambermaids; and waitresses, determining the inadequacy of their wages. Members took jobs in twelve factories in several Oregon towns to collect their findings, which aided the 1913 passage of a minimum wage law in Oregon.

Many literary clubs formed in late nineteenth-century America for the purpose of educating women. Limited opportunities for learning caused Oregon women to meet in small groups on a weekly or monthly basis to tutor each other on topics in history, literature, and geography and offer scholarships or loans to young women students. Members drew a variety of advantages from such meetings, beyond acquaintance with major authors and ideas from the past. Social interaction, over tea and cookies, nurtured networking to assess community needs. Members gained public speaking skills when they took their turns delivering their research findings to their peers. They mastered Parliamentary Procedure via Roberts’ Rules of Order to discuss club themes in an orderly fashion. Most importantly, they built confidence and organizational skill to embark on a new path, that of addressing the many social problems they had observed in their communities.

The need for public libraries enjoyed early club attention. Committed to learning among themselves, members built on the idea of tiny reading rooms that the WCTU had initiated to draw sailors, soldiers, and other imbibers from saloons for recreation. In town after town, women’s clubs donated books and staffed these small collections in downtown storefronts for the general public to borrow. Soon, they approached Andrew Carnegie’s foundation for permanent buildings, agreeing to his bargain to stir up local support for new taxes to acquire books and periodicals and hire staff to manage the facility. The Eugene Fortnightly (founded 1893) established a free library in 1902; Pendleton Library Club raised funds in 1908. Ontario’s Work and Win Club (later Ontario Stud Club) opened a reading room that became the public library.

Additional educational priorities absorbed societies of women. Sororities formed at institutions of higher learning to assist women students in networking to succeed at their studies. Western Oregon Normal School expected its future teachers to participate in the Vespertines, a literary society that encouraged recitations that would benefit their poise in their classrooms. Colleges and normal schools encouraged alumnae associations to support the alma mater. The Eugene branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae aided the University of Oregon’s Women’s League to fund a Woman’s Building on the campus.

The Portland Woman’s Club was a prominent group, founded in 1895 by the city’s movers and shakers. By 1900, its membership of 129 included leading women in voluntary organizations and the professions but also admitted stenographers, teachers, artists, and housewives. Renowned suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway served as its president from 1902 to 1903. A department club, it offered subcommittees that enabled small groups of members to study German, French, Oregon history, Parliamentary Law, Shakespeare, Browning, Music, Philanthropic Needs, the Home, or Pottery. Embracing the spirit of civic reform that invigorated most clubs by the early twentieth century, the members also endorsed higher salaries for teachers, regulation of newsboy employment, free textbooks for school children, public health improvements, improved parks, and Traveler’s Aid for newcomers at railroad and boat terminals. In 1901, the club endorsed the selection of a member, Mrs. C.E. Sutton, for school board, a position she held until 1911. The club membership made an impact on the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, despite marginalization by the men who planned the fair, by raising funds for a bronze statue sculpted by Alice Cooper of Indian guide Sacajawea, which was unveiled at the fair and remains in a Portland city park.

Success for club reforms was enhanced by the creation of federations, which permitted Oregon’s many clubwomen to confer regularly and share techniques for change. The Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs was established in 1901, although early clubs had already joined the national General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the 1890s — the Thursday Afternoon Club in Pendleton, Twentieth Century Club in Portland, Baker City Woman’s Club, and the Fireman’s Coffee Club in Corvallis, which served refreshments to firemen during fire-fighting. By 1910, the Oregon Federation boasted 51 clubs with a membership of 4,000 women. Such cooperation facilitated many legislative reforms, including mothers’ pensions, minimum wage laws, pure food and drug inspections, kindergartens, funding for public libraries, and sterilization of the “feeble-minded.” Even before women won the vote, they collectively influenced lawmakers with insistent pressure by their growing memberships.

Women were ambitious to re-shape society and registered frustration with government reluctance to embrace social reforms proposed by their clubs. This moved some members to work for woman suffrage. Activist Susan B. Anthony had toured Portland, Oregon City, Eugene, Roseburg, and Jacksonville in 1871, lecturing widely to win support for women’s enfranchisement. She returned in 1905, when the Lewis and Clark Exposition hosted the conference of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The legendary activist was accompanied both times by Oregon’s Abigail Scott Duniway, a life-long supporter of Women’s Equal Suffrage Associations, if a controversial strategist for achieving the vote. Six campaigns were staged by women to gain full citizenship, success arriving with the 1912 effort to persuade Oregon voters to support women’s enfranchisement.

Although Oregon women have enjoyed additional venues for social and political impulses, study, and community-mindedness since they won their suffrage fight, evidence of Oregon’s vigorous club life remains visible today in the Sacajawea statue in Portland’s Washington Park, YWCA buildings, the Garden Club–sponsored Memorial Highway signage at highway rest stops, and the Woman’s building on the University of Oregon campus. Women’s clubs continue to attract Oregon membership, carrying on the educational and reform impulses of their forebears a century ago.

Further Reading

Lucia H. Faxon Additon, Twenty Eventful Years of the Oregon Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1880–1900 (Portland: Gotshall Printing Company, 1904).

Jane Cunningham Croly, The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (New York: Henry G. Allen and Company, 1898).

Sandra Haarsager, Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

Deborah M. Olsen, “Fair Connections: Women’s Separatism and the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 109:2 (Summer 2008): 174–203.

Carli Crozier Schiffner, “Continuing to ‘Do Everything’ in Oregon: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1900–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 2005).

About the Author

Karen J. Blair has been a professor of history at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington since 1987. Much of her research has focused on the history of Pacific Northwest women.

Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915)

by Jean M. Ward

Outspoken and often controversial, Abigail Scott Duniway is remembered as Oregon’s “Mother of Equal Suffrage” and “the pioneer Woman Suffragist of the great Northwest.” As lecturer, organizer, writer, and editor, Duniway devoted over forty years to the cause of women’s rights.

In Idaho Territory in 1896, Duniway celebrated victory for woman suffrage. In Washington Territory, her early successes were overturned, although the State of Washington would give women the vote in 1910. In Oregon, which defeated woman suffrage more times than any other state, Duniway witnessed five losses—in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1910—before Oregon women gained the ballot in 1912.

Encouraged by her mentor, Susan B. Anthony, Duniway attended national suffrage conventions and became one of five NWSA (National Women’s Suffrage Association) vice-presidents-at-large. In 1890, she helped negotiate the merger of the NWSA and AWSA (American Woman Suffrage Association) as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Less remembered, perhaps, is Duniway’s extensive written legacy, including her weekly human-rights newspaper, The New Northwest, which she edited and published in Portland for sixteen years (1871-1887); The Coming Century, her “Journal of Progress and Reform” (1891-1892); and The Pacific Empire, a Portland weekly she edited for three years (1895-1897). She also wrote an epic poem, David and Anna Matson (1876); an autobiography, Path Breaking (1914); and twenty-two novels, including Captain Gray’s Company (1859), the first novel commercially published in Oregon and later revised as From the West to the West (1905).

Duniway’s novels addressed women’s rights, and most were serialized in The New Northwest and The Pacific Empire. Dedicated to the improvement of “woman’s condition” and personally aware of the hardships women faced, Duniway opened the pages of The New Northwest to other Pacific Northwest women writers such as Frances Fuller Victor, Minnie Myrtle Miller, and Bethenia Owens-Adair.

Abigail Scott was born October 22, 1834, to John Tucker and Ann Roelofson Scott, in Tazewell County, Illinois, the third of twelve children. In 1852, the Scotts traveled to Oregon Territory with their nine surviving children, and seventeen-year-old Abigail was assigned the task of keeping a daily journal.

During her first year in Oregon, while teaching in Eola, Abigail met Benjamin C. Duniway. They were married in August 1853 and settled on Ben’s donation claim in Clackamas County. They later moved to Yamhill County, but then lost both farms—one to fire and the other to flood and collection on promissory notes.

After Ben suffered permanent injury in a runaway-team accident in 1862, he could do only light work. At Lafayette and then Albany, Abigail became the primary breadwinner for the family, taking in boarders, teaching school, and running a millinery shop. In 1871, the Duniways moved to Portland with their five sons and daughter. The New Northwest became their family enterprise, with Ben assisting in business matters and older sons helping with printing. “Writing always was our forte,” Abigail Duniway announced in her first issue of The New Northwest. “If we had been a man,” she added, “we’d have had an editor’s position and handsome salary at twenty-one” At age thirty-six, she may have been thinking of her younger brother, Harvey Scott, then junior editor and later chief editor and part owner of the Oregonian.

Fully committed to her signature line, “Yours for Liberty,” and guided by The New Northwest motto of “Free Speech, Free Press, Free People,” Abigail Scott Duniway exposed and combated what she identified as social injustice. She discussed questions as diverse as the legal status of women, the treatment of the Chinese, policies related to American Indians, and the limits of Temperance and Prohibition.

Unlike Harvey, who graduated from Pacific University, Abigail was mainly self-taught and had less than a year of formal schooling in rural Illinois. Still, she was determined to make The New Northwest a voice for human rights, particularly woman suffrage. To her great disappointment, beginning with the campaign of 1884, her brother Harvey’s increasingly conservative position helped defeat equal suffrage in Oregon. The Oregonian did not actively support woman suffrage until the victory year of 1912, two years after Harvey’s death.

Duniway was honored when Governor Oswald West asked her to write the Oregon Woman Suffrage Proclamation in 1912, but she did not live to see the Nineteenth Amendment grant suffrage to all women. On October 11, 1915, a few days before her eighty-first birthday, she died in a Portland hospital. Abigail Scott Duniway’s final Portland residence was at the Fordham Apartments, 742 SW Vista Ave (formerly 170 Vista Ave).

Further Reading

Kessler, Lauren. “A Siege of the Citadels: Search for a Public Forum for the Ideas of Oregon Woman Suffrage.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 84 (Summer 1983).

Moynihan, Ruth Barnes. Rebel for Rights, Abigail Scott Duniway. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Ward, Jean M., and Elaine A. Maveety. Yours for Liberty: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000.

This essay is reproduced here with permission of The Oregon Encyclopedia. To learn more visit www.oregonencyclopedia.org

Copyright © 2008-2011 Portland State University

About the Author

Jean M. Ward is Professor Emerita of communication, and cofounder of the Gender Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College. With Elaine Maveety, she co-edited Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925: Lives, Memories, and Writings, and “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper.

Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy, M.D. (1869–1967)

Advocate for Women’s Votes, Full Citizenship, and Civic Health

By Kimberly Jensen

Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., shaped the Oregon woman suffrage movement in vital ways as an innovative leader of the second generation of activists during the campaigns of 1906 and 1912. She also represented Oregon in national suffrage politics and organizations through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. As a physician and public health advocate, Lovejoy asserted that women needed the vote to build policies and legislation that would ensure healthy and safe communities. And as a wage-earning woman who worked her way through medical school in a department store, she linked the ballot with progressive legislation for women workers. Holding appointed office as Portland city health officer from 1907 to 1909, before women in Oregon had the franchise, and running for U.S. Congress in 1920, Lovejoy mapped out broader aspects of women’s complete citizenship — beyond the vote. She would build on the ideas and lessons from the Oregon suffrage movement in her transnational medical humanitarian work from 1919 to 1967.

Pohl Lovejoy’s entrance into active work for woman suffrage blended her career and identity as a physician with the reinvigoration of the votes-for-women movement in Oregon. In the summer of 1905, both the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the American Medical Association held their national conventions in Portland at the same time as the Lewis and Clark Exposition. As President of the all-female Portland Medical Club, Esther Pohl was involved in both events and greeted suffragists on behalf of the assembled women physicians. In her subsequent suffrage work, Pohl insisted on the need for women to have the vote to support legislation and candidates advocating pure food and milk, clean water, and other public health policies. She believed community health was a political issue and a civic duty. Pohl met local and national suffrage leaders and worked with them as they made plans for the 1906 campaign. Here, she began a lasting friendship and working partnership with NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw.

The 1906 Oregon campaign was an important part of the new votes-for-women movement that included effective use of popular culture and mass media for visible and vigorous campaigns. Esther Pohl helped develop these new strategies using lively campaign literature and organizing a float in the May 1906 Made in Oregon parade. On Election Day, June 4, Pohl organized and assisted the women who would be distributing suffrage literature at Portland polling places. Anna Shaw, at the end of several months of work in Oregon, recalled the day in her autobiography: “All day long Dr. Pohl took me in her automobile from one polling place to another. At each we found representative women patiently enduring the drenching rain while they tried to persuade men to vote for us. We distributed sandwiches, courage and inspiration among them, and tried to cheer in the same way the women [poll] watchers, whose appointment we had secured that year for the very first time.” In the aftermath of this promising but unsuccessful campaign, Pohl did not participate actively with Abigail Scott Duniway and the small group of suffragists who mounted the 1908 and 1910 ballot measures in the midst of conflicts with national leaders.

She did take an essential part in the successful 1912 campaign. Her contributions were in three major areas. The first was leadership in several vital suffrage leagues and coalition building among dozens of other suffrage groups, each speaking directly to particular groups of male voters. The second was her continuing development and use of the new campaign strategies of mass media and popular culture to get out the vote. Finally, she served as a bridge connecting national and local leaders and workers in the campaign.

Esther Pohl was a leader of the Portland Woman’s Club Suffrage Campaign Committee and linked that committee with financial contributions from Anna Howard Shaw and wider NAWSA support. She was a member of several other local groups, including the Portland Equal Suffrage League. As the number of Portland suffrage organizations reached a total of twenty-three and as dozens of leagues formed across the state, Pohl was a frequent speaker at their various events. She also created speakers’ forums attended by members of various suffrage organizations and helped coordinate major events. In the fall of 1912, she organized Everybody’s Equal Suffrage League to underscore the importance of coalitions and the democratic principles of woman suffrage. She also hoped to encourage working women, often unable to pay the monthly dues of other groups, to join in this umbrella organization for the cause. With the payment of a lifetime membership of twenty-five cents, every member of the League automatically became a vice president.

Workers in the 1912 campaign, with Pohl taking an important lead, used the full potential of popular culture and mass advertising to reach their victory. Pohl assisted with the production and distribution of campaign literature and newspaper advertising, and she worked to place eye-catching suffrage slides and curtain signs at several dozen Portland movie theaters and displays in department stores. She led workers in a Suffrage Lunch Wagon festooned with banners and flags, selling sandwiches and other snacks along with the importance of votes for women during Portland’s Rose Festival week in June. And with her second husband George Lovejoy, she formed a suffrage “flying squadron,” riding by car to outlying areas of Multnomah and Clackamas counties, posting votes for women broadsides on columns and in storefronts and filling mailboxes with persuasive pamphlets.

Pohl Lovejoy facilitated contributions and support from national suffrage leaders and convinced Anna Howard Shaw to come to Oregon for a cross-state campaign in September and October. Shaw’s visit at the Pendleton Round-Up and participation in parades, speeches, and other events in Portland and other cities, even speaking from an open automobile, proved very popular, another way to advertise the importance of women’s right to the ballot. The success of the 1912 campaign with a victory that November 5 owed much to Pohl Lovejoy’s leadership and the work of countless other supporters.

Before Oregon women achieved the vote, Pohl served in appointed office, expanding women’s citizenship rights in this arena. Progressive Democratic Mayor Harry Lane, M.D., appointed Esther Pohl to the Portland city health board in 1905 and then as city health officer for his second term from 1907 to 1909. She shared Lane’s progressive Democratic viewpoint, fighting entrenched “interests” on behalf of the people, a view that expanded during her tenure as city health officer and after. She also worked with woman suffrage supporter George E. Chamberlain, Oregon’s Democratic governor from 1902 to 1908, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1908 and again in 1914. Esther Pohl Lovejoy brought this partisan political identity as a Democrat to her new role as a voter after 1912.

In 1914, national leaders of the Congressional Union (CU) for Woman Suffrage sent organizers around the nation to fight against the election of Democratic members of Congress, holding the Democratic Party and the Wilson administration then in power in Washington, D.C., responsible for the failure to act on a federal suffrage amendment. Lovejoy saw this as a direct challenge to her role as a voting Oregon Democrat and believed the CU was absolutely wrong to oppose Chamberlain, long active in his support for women’s right to the ballot. When CU organizer Jessie Stubbs came to Oregon, Lovejoy was vigorous in her active opposition through speeches, letters, and personal visits, and she spoke out at a 1915 women voters’ conference in San Francisco.

After 1912, Esther Lovejoy continued to lead Everybody’s Equal Suffrage League, and in 1916, she founded the Oregon Equal Suffrage Alliance. She also served as the Oregon state representative to the NAWSA Congressional Committee in 1916 to help lobby for the federal suffrage amendment. The new NAWSA president, Carrie Chapman Catt, asked her to represent Oregon on a special suffrage “Emergency Corps” in 1920 to work in various states to urge legislators to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. That same year, Lovejoy ran as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress from Oregon’s Third District, building on her suffrage campaign experience to mount an effective campaign. With 44 percent of the vote, she demonstrated the power of her message in a year of Republican landslides and modeled another aspect of full female citizenship by seeking elective office.

Lovejoy represented a number of women’s organizations and worked with the Red Cross during the First World War. In 1919, she accepted the chair of the American Women’s Hospitals (AWH), an all-female medical relief organization sponsored by the U.S. Medical Women’s National Association during the conflict. Under her leadership from 1919 to 1967, the AWH established a feminist vision of medical humanitarian relief across borders. She was an organizer and first president of the Medical Women’s International Association from 1919 to 1924. Lovejoy expanded the views she had developed about women’s votes, citizenship, and civic health in her years of Portland activism to embrace a concept of international health. This was based on the view that social and economic justice and an end to war were essential conditions for healthy communities across the globe. And empowered women citizens across nations, she believed, could make this possible.

Support for votes for women was at the core of Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy’s activism. Active in the Oregon movement from 1906 to 1920, she pioneered new strategies and connected Oregon with national leaders. She linked her call for votes for women with her public health message. Lovejoy built the experiences and ideas of her Oregon work into her transnational feminist activism for international health and social justice. Her story suggests the important place Oregon has in the broad movements for woman suffrage, full citizenship, and human rights that continues today.

 

Further Reading

Kimberly Jensen, “Feminist Transnational Activism and International Health: The Medical Women’s International Association and the American Women’s Hospitals, 1919–1948,” in Kimberly Jensen and Erika Kuhlman, eds., Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2010), 143–72.

Kimberly Jensen, “‘Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign’: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108:3 (Fall 2007): 350–383.

Esther Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

Esther Lovejoy, The House of the Good Neighbor (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

Esther Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915).

About the Author

Kimberly Jensen teaches history and gender studies at Western Oregon University. Dr. Jensen is the author of Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War and she is writing a biography of Esther Lovejoy.

Oregon Woman Suffrage in National Context

By Rebecca J. Mead, Ph.D., Northern Michigan University

Western victories were crucial to the success of the woman suffrage movement at many phases of the struggle, and the Pacific Northwest was an important locus of agitation and source of innovation. Most of the women of the western United States were enfranchised on the state level well before passage of the federal amendment in 1920. These victories were possible because the decentralized federal system allowed territories and states to decide voter qualifications, and because suffragists and other reformers worked together to win woman suffrage as a progressive electoral reform. After the Civil War, there were a few unusual western victories: Wyoming Territory (1869), Utah Territory (1870), Washington Territory (women enfranchised in 1883, disfranchised in 1888), Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896). By 1900, the momentum had stalled, but a new generation of suffragists had novel ideas for modern campaigns. They developed sophisticated public outreach tactics, made creative use of the media and advertising, and employed direct action techniques (such as public displays, mass meetings, and street speaking), which attracted positive publicity and support. These “New Women,” as they were popularly known, were often educated professionals with connections to labor and reform movements, and their adoption of radical methods sometimes upset older or more traditional women and led to internal controversies and organizational splits. Nevertheless, the string of western state suffrage victories beginning in 1910 demonstrated the invigorating effects of these new approaches.

Understanding the western context is vital to any analysis of the U.S. suffrage movement. The more fluid political environment of the West encouraged experimentation, and reform movements encouraged the breakthrough suffrage victories in Washington (1910) and California (1911,) which reenergized the movement regionally and nationally. Oregon, Arizona, and Alaska Territory all enfranchised women residents in 1912, followed by Montana and Nevada in 1914, resulting in a population of four million female western voters by 1915. These voting women influenced their elected representatives, a situation the National Women’s Party (NWP) tried to turn to Democratic disadvantage in two national elections and in the federal amendment campaign. A number of talented and experienced western women organizers moved east and became involved in the final phases of the struggle, while others remained active at the state level. More research is needed to clarify the western contributions to the final amendment victory and to understand the various ways Western women used their votes and political power after enfranchisement.

Oregon became a very early leader in the western movement when Abigail Scott Duniway began publishing her women’s rights newspaper, The New Northwest, in 1871. Independent suffrage journalists like Duniway were not uncommon, and they were particularly influential in the West because they provided geographically isolated populations with information, advice, and motivation. They also toured, spoke, and helped establish connections and networks. Duniway was an early pioneer, businesswoman, and major family breadwinner who still found time for suffrage activism, and she soon became a dominant figure in the Pacific Northwest. In 1871, Duniway traveled to San Francisco to see the national leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were on a western speaking tour, and Anthony accepted Duniway’s invitation to extend her trip into the Pacific Northwest. The two women traveled all over the region and into British Columbia, making many speeches and receiving both praise and criticism for their revolutionary ideas. They worked with local suffragists to establish clubs in Seattle, Olympia, and Portland and helped organize Washington’s first suffrage convention in November, which resulted in the formation of the Washington Territory Woman Suffrage Association (WTWSA). Anthony was thrilled by the invitation to address the Washington territorial legislature, because this was the first time a woman had spoken before a legislative body on this issue. The pending suffrage bill was defeated, despite her appeals.

Like many western leaders, Duniway often disliked or resented national organizers, characterizing them as pushy and interfering outsiders ignorant of western conditions. Duniway advocated a “still hunt” approach that emphasized systematic but subtle lobbying work. She condemned the public (“hurrah”) campaigns preferred by Anthony because she was sure that these only galvanized the well-organized and well-funded forces of opposition. Duniway’s paranoia about liquor interests was not unfounded, and the two women agreed on the need to dissociate suffrage from temperance. Duniway nevertheless repeatedly offended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the still hunt was not an effective method of mass public persuasion during a statewide referendum campaign. Duniway was a crucial early figure, but her long-term significance is more difficult to assess. By the early 1900s, her prickly personality and harsh statements had alienated the WCTU, clubwomen, and younger activists eager to try new ideas. Suffrage coalitions inevitably suffered from race, class, and generational tensions, strategic disagreements, and power struggles. Organizational splits sometimes were useful developments, allowing autonomous action and specialization by smaller groups, but chronic conflict drained the Oregon state association.

Although Duniway deserves much credit for her dedication to women’s rights, suffrage in Oregon could not have been achieved without the contributions of the younger, dynamic generation of “New Women” suffragists. In the early 1900s, another major suffrage journalist, Clara Bewick Colby, provided a natural rallying point for these women. Colby began her national women’s rights paper, The Women’s Tribune, in Nebraska in 1883 and moved to Portland in 1904. Duniway, who had ceased publication of The New Northwest in 1884, was initially congenial, but when Colby tried to establish a leadership position in the Oregon movement, Duniway developed a deep grudge against this “arch-pretender,” as she called Colby. She became active in the state leadership, but Colby’s paper did not thrive. Ironically, suffrage journalists who developed sophisticated press skills and learned how to use the mainstream media helped make traditional women’s rights papers obsolete.

In 1902, outreach to the general electorate became more important, as Oregon became the first state to adopt the initiative process as a progressive democratization measure. Reformers could now bypass stubborn legislatures and appeal directly to the voters to get measures on the ballot, making extensive statewide campaigning necessary to win an election, and the anti-suffrage interests were well organized. After 1902, suffrage measures appeared regularly on the Oregon ballot, but they failed to pass until 1912 due to various factors, including political corruption and organizational strife.

Nationally, suffragists had great hopes for the 1906 Oregon campaign. Duniway feared the “irrepressible ambition” of outside organizers, but she authorized the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association (OESA) to invite the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to hold its 1905 convention in Portland in conjunction with the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Speeches and resolutions at this meeting revealed the national significance suffragists attributed to this particular campaign, the progressive reform environment, and the West generally. Believing that the progressive West offered the best chance of suffrage success, the NAWSA leadership hoped to rebuild the national movement on the foundation of an Oregon campaign victory. As Duniway feared, NAWSA organizers remained after the convention to “take charge” of the 1906 Oregon campaign, and she stepped aside. Also assisted by numerous volunteers from other western states, Oregon suffragists conducted a modest public campaign. Although they continued to rely heavily on organizational endorsements, they actively courted working-class, socialist, and labor support through public speeches and union meetings. When the measure failed by more than 10,000 votes, suffragists did not abandon their growing conviction that working-class urban voters were the key to success. Noting various electoral anomalies, Oregon suffragists were convinced they had been cheated by a well-mobilized opposition funded primarily by liquor and vice interests.

The failure of the 1906 Oregon suffrage campaign led to a full-scale leadership battle at the state convention, but Duniway was able to regain control of the state organization. In the Women’s Tribune, Colby publicly criticized the “still hunt” and Duniway’s rabid hostility to the WCTU. The movement factionalized: although Duniway technically retained control of the OESA until 1912, the NAWSA redirected funding from the OESA to a committee of the Portland Women’s Club headed by Colby and others. Another “still hunt” suffrage campaign lost badly in 1910, despite the passage of a similar measure in Washington State the same year. More research is needed to explain these very different results in neighboring states as well as their regional interconnections. By the time Oregon passed woman suffrage in 1912, Washington and California had already enfranchised women citizens. The elderly Duniway fell ill in 1912, allowing younger women to take over the Oregon campaign and implement new ideas. Released from the imperatives of the “still hunt,” they even held a parade! Unlike many other first-generation suffragists, Duniway lived to see the measure pass and became the first woman to vote in Oregon. The subsequent political efforts of the state’s new generation of “pioneer” women voters comprise an area that also needs more attention and study.

Further Reading

Abigail Scott Duniway, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States. 2nd ed. New York: Source Books Press, 1970.

G. Thomas Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990.

Lauren Kessler, “The Fight for Woman Suffrage and the Oregon Press,” In Karen J. Blair, ed., Women in Pacific Northwest History.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988, pp. 43-58.

Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.

About the Author

Rebecca J. Mead is an associate professor the History Department at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches U.S. history, women’s history, public history, labor history, and Native American history. Her book How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914, explains the complex mix of alliances between suffragists and progressive and populist reformers, race relations in the West, and the sophisticated activism of Western women.