Women lawyers were key participants in the successful 1912 campaign for votes for women in Oregon.

Olive England Enright was the first woman to graduate from Willamette Law School in 1889 and was admitted to the Oregon bar in 1898. She was the president of the Salem Equal Suffrage League. Suffragists in Salem elected Enright as president of the League at their initial meeting in March 1912 where "sixty-five women and a large number of men, including most of the state officers, from Governor West down have signified intention to join the club." She died in 1936.

See her image and a brief biography at the Oregon State Library site: http://photos.lib.state.or.us/exhibit4/e40577a.htm and see "Salem Suffragists Organize in Club," Oregon Journal, March 10, 1912, 3; and Montague Colmer, comp. History of the Bench and Bar in Oregon (Portland: Historical Publishing, 1910), 24.


Olive Stott Gabriel was born in Yamhill County, Oregon in 1871 and graduated from St. Mary's Academy in Portland in 1889. She received her L.L.B. and L.L.M. degrees from New York University, completing her graduate work in 1903. By 1912 she was associate editor of the Women Lawyer's Journal. Gabriel returned to Oregon in the summer of 1912 to work for woman suffrage and remained through the campaign. She placed particular emphasis on working women and the vote in her speeches and meetings. When she returned to New York Gabriel was active in state and national suffrage work, later joining the National Woman's Party and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment.

Gabriel became president of the National Association of Women Lawyers in 1930 and served for three terms. She received an honorary L.L.D. degree from the University of Chicago for her work advocating the legal rights of women. Her obituaries noted that she had a "reputation and record of never refusing to accept a woman's case" and often worked pro bono. Gabriel returned to Portland in the mid 1930s and died in 1944.

See "Editor Will Speak," Oregon Journal, October 13, 1912, 5; "Suffrage Worker Appeals for Ballot," Oregon Journal, October 15, 1912, 2; "Services Set for Lawyer, Head of National Group," Oregonian, May 9, 1944, 9; "Olive S. Gabriel, Suffrage Leader," New York Times, May 10, 1944, 19 and entries for her at the Stanford Women's Legal History Biography Project site at: http://womenslegalhistory.stanford.edu/profiles/GabrielOliveScott.html 
                                                                 

                                                                               --Kimberly Jensen