Pioneer Profiles – November 2020 – Published Online-Only
2020 is not only a seminal election year, it also marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which gave women full voting rights. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee tipped the balance, becoming the 36th state to ratify the Amendment. Their youngest legislator, Harry Burn, cast the deciding vote because his mother advised him to “be a good boy.” Prior to that, however, 20 U.S. states had already granted voting rights to women on the state level. Oregon had done so on November 12, 1912—the sixth time such legislation had been introduced. Abigail Scott Duniway is considered the major force behind the suffrage movement in Oregon… and Abigail had a history with Jacksonville. Sharon Bywater shares that history in this article reprinted from the Southern Oregon Historical Society’s Summer 2020 Quarterly magazine. – C. Kingsnorth
Abigail Scott Duniway devoted her life to the cause of women’s suffrage and gaining equal rights for women, but she was no diplomat. Quite the contrary, her sharp tongue and outspoken views made enemies wherever she went, and nowhere more so than in Jacksonville, Oregon.
When Portland based Duniway came to southern Oregon in 1879 on a tour in support of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, she was welcomed warmly in Phoenix and Ashland, but in Jacksonville, she was pelted with eggs and burned in effigy. Her offense was unearthing the past marital difficulties of one of the town’s most prominent citizens, Judge Paine Page Prim. She wrote scathingly in her newspaper, the New Northwest about Judge Prim having abandoned his wife, even though he and his wife had reconciled years before.
If she was trying to convince the men of the town to give women the right to vote, her outburst against the judge had the opposite effect. The Oregon Sentinel reported: “The doors of this town were kindly opened to her, but today there are few people in Jacksonville that will not look at her face with contempt.”
The editor of the Democratic Times wrote, “Matters that were buried and forgotten in the long ago have been revived for the sinister purpose of venting malignant spite upon one who enjoys the high esteem of all…. If these are the teachings of woman suffrage, it should be prohibited by statute.”
Duniway admitted in her autobiography, Path Breaking, that she was partly to blame for the incident, but dismissed the Jacksonville men as “old miners, or refugees from the bush-whacking regions of Missouri, whence they had been driven by the exigencies growing out of the Civil War.”
Duniway’s outspoken manner and strong determination were shaped by the trials of her life. An early pioneer, she was only 18 when she made the journey with her family by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon in 1852. Her ailing mother died during the trip, and Duniway, along with her father and eight other siblings, were left to manage for themselves. Her father gave her the task of keeping a diary of their trip, an early start to her long writing career.
She married Benjamin Duniway a year after arriving in Oregon and lived on his donation land claim in Clackamas County near Portland. While raising six children, she became the family breadwinner when her husband suffered a disabling accident and they lost their farm. She earned money teaching school, taking in boarders, and running a millinery shop. With only one year of formal schooling, she started a progressive newspaper, the New Northwest, with the goal of fighting for social justice. Her husband and older sons pitched in to help run the paper, which became a mouthpiece for the women’s suffrage movement.
Ironically, Duniway’s younger brother, Harvey Scott, became chief editor and part owner of the Portland Oregonian, the more established newspaper that argued against giving women the vote. It was said that only her brother’s death in 1910 finally put a stop to the Oregonian’s anti-suffrage editorials.
In addition to women’s suffrage, Duniway advocated allowing women to control their own finances and property. At the time, husbands could seize their wives’ personal property to pay their own debts. She once lamented, “We are reduced to the status of children and feeble-minded persons.” In the New Northwest she discussed diverse social issues and questioned the treatment of the Chinese and Native Americans in Oregon.
During her 40-year fight for women’s suffrage, Duniway served as President of the Western Chapter of the Women’s Suffrage Association and as an officer of the national chapter. She worked tirelessly for the cause, touring the Pacific Northwest with national suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. But her outspoken personality made her a controversial and often divisive figure.
Although she was never again pelted with eggs or burned in effigy, she made many enemies, including members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) who were campaigning to ban alcohol during the same period. Duniway believed that many men would not give women the right to vote if they used it to ban alcohol. She also earned the enmity of the churches, which were strong supporters of prohibition. Prohibitionists considered her an infidel and accused her of selling out to the liquor industry.
Even those who agreed with her anti-prohibition views considered her a hindrance to the cause because of her divisive manner. To distance herself from her detractors, she spent several years campaigning in Idaho and Washington, coming back to Portland in 1894 to take up the cause in Oregon once more.
Women’s suffrage was voted down five times in Oregon over a period of almost 30 years before finally passing on November 12, 1912. By then, Duniway was nearly 80 and suffering from ill health. Although younger women had taken up the cause, building successful coalitions that helped win the final vote, Duniway had been there from the beginning and her perseverance won her an important place in Oregon history. The governor, Oswald West, recognized Duniway as the major force behind the suffrage movement in Oregon and asked her to write and sign the Equal Suffrage Proclamation. He gave her the honor of being the first woman in Oregon to vote.
Duniway published her autobiography in 1914, a year before her death. In it she presented a more forgiving face. Perhaps trying to make amends for her earlier criticism, Duniway had kind words for Jacksonville. She praised southern Oregon in general for its “whole souled men and hospitable women.” And she wrote that Jacksonville had become the “center of a large degree of Equal Suffrage sentiment.” Aside from her one unfortunate experience, she said she was always made to feel at home there.
Duniway did not live to see the passage of the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote nationally. She died in Portland in 1915 just before her 81st birthday.
Pioneer Profiles is a project of Historic Jacksonville, Inc. Given the need to cancel all events this year, we’re providing on-line learning opportunities at www.historicjacksonville.org. Join us for three virtual tours—”Walk through History” with weekly stops at sites in Jacksonville’s National Historic Landmark District; “Beekman Bank Nuggets,” artifacts and stories from the 1863 Beekman Bank Museum; and “Mrs. Beekman Invites You to Call…,” an opportunity to tour the 1873 Beekman House Museum, home to Jacksonville’s wealthiest and most prominent pioneer family, with Mrs. Julia Beekman as your tour guide.