Sheros
Our theme for tomorrow's Red Thread Circle is Wonder Woman, connecting with our own power. One of my Sheros is Abigail Scott Duniway - our own 'Oregon Pioneer Suffregette!'
Born in 1834, Abigail's family traveled by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon in 1852, and seventeen-year-old Abigail Scott was assigned the task of keeping a daily journal.
She married Ben Duniway the next year, and they settled in the Willamette valley. Her husband was injured in 1962, and Abigail became the breadwinner, taking boarders, teaching school and running a millinery shop.
The family moved to Portland in 1871, and Abigail began a weekly human-rights newspaper, The New Northwest, which she edited and published in Portland for sixteen years (1871-1887)
Abigail first headed to the polls (closed at the time to women) at 38, in 1872; after campaigning for Ulysses S Grant/ Henry Wilson.
On election day, Abigail led Mary Laurinda Jane Smith Beatty, a Black woman, and Mary Ann King Lambert and Maria P. Hendee, two white women, to the polls, where all attempted to vote.
Although their votes were not counted, their effort contributed to the creation of the Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association in 1873.
Scott-Duniway kept showing up at the polls, bringing Susan B Anthony to Oregon several times, and campaigning for suffrage. She helped form the national sufferage Association in 1890, helped women gain the vote in Idaho territory in 1896 - and *finally* in 1912, (the year my mom was born) Oregon women were granted the right to vote!!
- My grandad Mel drove my grandmother Mary to the county seat from their farm in Sisters, to register - for the opposing party! They were 32 and 31.
"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.
"From the speaking platform and in her writings, she discussed questions as diverse as the legal status of women, the rights of Blacks, the treatment of the Chinese, policies related to American Indians, and the limits of Temperance and Prohibition."
(Some Indigenous men were able to vote in Oregon elections in the 1890s, before gaining that right nationally!)
Governor Oswald West asked her to write the Oregon Woman Suffrage Proclamation in 1912. Largely self educated, Abigail had less than a year of formal schooling, back in Illinois.
- My youngest grandkids are students at Dunniway Middle School, and I know Abigail would have been chuffed at the packed house for senator Merkley's town hall in the school gym last weekend, and that my 14 year old granddaughter was there with us!
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