Take 1 octagonal barn, 1 suffrage lecturer, 2 pioneer women political figures, 15 Suffrage Players, and 161 history enthusiasts and you get one packed, fun, sing-along educational evening at the Century of Action-Oregon Encyclopedia History night at McMenamins Cornelius Pass Roadhouse last Tuesday. In addition to learning about how Oregon women got the right to vote in Oregon in 1912, and the important contributions women have made to the state in the century since then, attendees donated over $2500 dollars to the Century of Action centennial project.

Thank you all for making this a great event!

For a glimpse at some of the festivities see below or go to our Century-of-Action-Oregon-Women-Vote Facebook Page.

"Suffrage Interest Keen: Speakers Engaged to Conduct Educational Campaign at Grants Pass," The Oregonian, May 20, 1912, 7.

 

Grants Pass suffragists invited Rosetta (Mrs. Jackson) Silbaugh* to speak on how woman suffrage could help to solve the problems of cities. Many supporters would have been interested in the specific ways that women's votes could make their community a better place, something with which many were involved in this progressive era. The topic no doubt appealed to many in the "large gathering."

 

The article also indicates that Josephine County suffragists were working to organize their group for effective action at the local level, another important ingredient for success.

 

And finally, the article showcases another vital feature of successful suffrage organizing - networking and support across states. Seattle's Rosetta Silbaugh had been involved in Washington state suffrage activities in 1910 and provided a voice of experience in this meeting. Cross-state cooperation was not confined to suffrage alone. Two years later Silbaugh would work with Oregon activist Caroline J. Gleason and other Industrial Welfare Commission members in Washington and Oregon to report on conditions for women wage-earners. Suffrage activism led the way to other modes of activism after the campaign was completed.

 

*(not Silsbaugh as The Oregonian had it)

 

Additional Reading:

 

Caroline J. Gleason (Sister Miriam Theresa), Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Washington on the Wages, Conditions of Work, and Costs and Standards of Living of Women Wage Earners in Washington (Olympia: Washington State Industrial Welfare Commission, 1914)

On the first day of the convention that would create the Oregon Woman Suffrage Association the weather was "inclement" and the "Mass Meeting of the Friends and Advocates of the Woman Movement" at Portland's Oro Fino Theater started a half an hour late. Perhaps organizers hoped that more supporters would venture out in the rain. Though small in numbers, this organizing meeting for the first state suffrage organization in Oregon had a "remarkable degree of earnestness and enthusiasm." The men and women gathered decided to organize a state equal suffrage society "to secure more united action and influence in the work."

 

The OWSA appealed "to the citizens of Oregon who believe in the principle of 'equality before the law' to aid this Association in every possible way by placing these self-evident truths before the people that all men and women are created equal, and of right ought to be equally free and independent in law, custom, and ethos, and we urge them to proceed at once to perfect the different county organizations throughout the State."

 

On the afternoon of the first day, February 14, 1873 those present elected Abbie Gibson of Portland as president of the Oregon Woman Suffrage Association, with various vice presidents representing Oregon counties and an executive committee. From the beginning women and men from around the state were officers in the association.

 

On the second day an African American suffragist from Portland, Mrs. Mary Beatty, addressed the group. Portland historian Tim Hills has located Mary Beatty in the Portland City Directory as a dressmaker married to J.W. Beatty. Three months earlier Beatty had joined three other Portland suffragists, Abigail Scott Duniway, Maria Hendee, and Mrs. M.A. Lambert, in attempting to vote in the presidential election of November 1872.

 

Other participants included Abigail Scott Duniway, Mary Anna Thompson, M.D., Bethenia Owens (later Owens-Adair) M.D. and Colonel C. A. Reed of Salem.

Many Oregon men supported votes for women in the final and successful 1912 campaign. On January 3, 1912, dozens of men gathered at the Commercial Club in Portland to form what would become the Men's Equal Suffrage League of Multnomah County, chaired by attorney William M. "Pike" Davis. Abigail Scott Duniway served as acting chair for the evening. Politicians, judges, attorneys and labor leaders spoke in favor of suffrage.

 

Some had "long favored" votes for women, including former state legislator C.W. Fulton who introduced an amendment to the Oregon constitution providing for woman suffrage in 1883. Among the more "recent converts" was attorney and state senator Dan J. Malarky who said that "the light had been breaking in on him for a long time but he was converted last year." Labor leaders in support of suffrage included Floyd Ramp of the Socialist Party of Oregon and Eugene Smith, vice president of the Electrical Workers' Union.

 

Oregon men joined men in other states who had organized to support votes for women. Their support was a significant element of the victory in Oregon in 1912.

 

Additional reading

 

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.

Image: "Men Lend Aid in Great Battle for Woman Suffrage," Oregon Journal, January 4, 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.

Additional 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.

Image: "First Woman to Vote in Umatilla City, OR.," Oregon Journal, December 5, 1912, 10.

As suffragists and their supporters prepared for the November 1912 election they held final meetings across the state to draw attention to the woman suffrage measure on the ballot, including a large group in Salem. This article demonstrates the variety of suffrage supporters and the reach of suffrage ideas in Salem and the state.

Image:  "Salem Suffragists Dine," Oregonian, November 3, 1912, 9.

In the final Oregon woman suffrage campaign in 1912 activists in communities across the state used county fairs as a way to publicize their views and reach male voters. At the Jackson County Fair one hundred women decorated cars and rode horses as a "special attraction" in the "Made in Medford" parade. Gladys Heard, secretary of the Medford Equal Suffrage Association, rode in the lead car festooned with sunflowers and filled with children. Other cars sported "Votes for Women" flags and streamers. Across this 1912 campaign suffragists took their cause to the people and used popular culture and mass media to make their argument. 

Opponents of woman suffrage asserted that the vote would take women away from traditional home duties. Medford suffragists created a float to make fun of this argument. "Prominent Medford men" E.E. Kelly, C. L. Schlefflin and Holbrook Withington dressed as women and as the float passed through the streets they washed clothes and nursed a "huge rag doll" with a whiskey bottle. Suffragists may also have included the children of supporters in the lead car to emphasize that the vote would enhance women's roles as mothers, not detract from them.

References

 

Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

 

Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

Some 230 women gathered at the Benson Hotel in Portland on Saturday, August 28, 1920 to celebrate the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which made woman suffrage the law of the United States. Oregon women had had full voting rights for almost eight years. Both houses of the Oregon legislature had voted to adopt House Joint Resolution 1, introduced by Representative Sylvia Thompson, on January 12, 1920, making Oregon the twenty-fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Tennessee was the last of the thirty-six states to ratify the amendment and it became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920.

Mayor George Baker issued a proclamation asking all Portlanders to participate in a demonstration for noon on Saturday August 28 to recognize the event. Supporters urged mills, factories and churches across the state to ring bells and blow whistles to commemorate the day. At the Benson Hotel women "stood at attention around their tables" at noon for the ringing of the bells as the start of the victory luncheon.

The event commemorated the work of early leader Abigail Scott Duniway, who had died in 1915, and members of "the younger generation" who had been active in the successful 1912 campaign. And those present looked to the future as the Oregon Equal Suffrage Alliance became the League of Women Voters of Oregon with Effie Comstock Simmons as president.





References

"Senate Gives Way for Mrs. Thompson," Oregonian, January 14, 1920, 6

"Oregon Women Joyous Because Suffrage Wins in Tennessee," Oregon Journal, August 18, 1920, 1.

"Women of Portland to Celebrate Saturday," Oregonian, August 26, 1920, 1.

"Suffragists Here Celebrate Victory," Oregonian, August 29, 1920, 20.

Jean H. Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)

One Woman One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, prod. Ruth Pollack, 1996, DVD, 146 minutes. www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/OneWomanOneVote/introduction

League of Women Voters of Oregon

By July 1912 workers across Oregon were active in the final campaign for woman suffrage that would result in victory in the November election. Oregon suffragists were building their campaign by using mass media and advertising techniques to get their message across to voters in early twentieth-century consumer culture.

The Portland Equal Suffrage League sponsored a three-day engagement for the film Votes for Women at the Star Theater in Portland. The film featured the story of a fiancée of a state senator opposed to the movement "whose signature alone is needed to put through equal suffrage legislation." She "becomes an ardent suffragist" and, along with suffrage workers, convinces the senator to vote for the bill. Filmmakers blended this fictional account with appearances by national suffrage leaders Anna Howard Shaw and Jane Addams, real-life "equal suffrage slogans and banners" and footage of a New York City suffrage parade.

The use of films like Votes for Women helped to create the modern suffrage movement and brought success to campaigns in states like Oregon that used mass media to put their message across. 

References

Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)

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.

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

"Motion Pictures Plea for Equal Suffrage," Oregon Journal, July 17, 1912, 5.