December 1912 First Woman Votes in Umatilla
“First Woman to Vote in Umatilla City, OR.,” Oregon Journal, December 5, 1912, 10.
Many cities in Oregon held elections in December 1912, just weeks after women in the stated gained the right to vote in November that year. Across the state women cast their ballots and fulfilled the other duties of voting citizens including service as election judges. In Umatilla Mrs. H. T. Duncan was the first woman to vote in her city election and she served as an election judge that day, no doubt an important fulfillment of her goals as a suffrage supporter. Duncan, in business in Umatilla for twenty years, operated the Duncan Hotel.
—Kimberly Jensen
Further reading:
Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social, and Economic Activities (New York: McGraw Hill, 1933), 245-56.
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