Voice reading: When women's true history shall have been written, her part in the upbuilding of this nation will astound the world.

Narrator: In 1787, the United States Constitution defined the rights of citizenship for the free men of this country.

After the Civil War, those same rights, including the right to vote, were extended to newly freed male slaves, but not to women of any social standing.

Not until well into the 20th century and the year 1920 did a constitutional amendment.

Finally, grant suffrage -voting rights- to American women.

History credits Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other East coast suffragists for the hard fought victory.

But there's an important sometimes overlooked footnote to the story.

Debra: At the time that women's suffrage was enacted nationally, the states of the West had already had suffrage for quite a while.

- Women in Oregon had been voting since 1912.

Thanks largely to the work of this woman, a straight talking farmer's wife, a mother of six with less than one year of classroom education.

Today in Portland's Riverview Cemetery, a small headstone marks the grave of Abigail Scott Duniway laid to rest here beside her daughter.

It's a modest memorial to a woman whose achievements still resonate so powerfully so many years later.

Throughout her long life, Abigail Scott Duniway carried a vivid memory from childhood of the time her mother sat in despair with a newborn child, a girl, Voice reading: And my mother said through her tears, poor baby shall be a woman someday.

Poor baby.

A woman's lot is so hard.

Debra: In the mid 19th century, women had no civil rights at all, particularly married women.

When married, a woman didn't have the right to own her own clothes.

She was not entitled to her own earnings.

She could legally be beaten by her husband.

- If a woman's husband died, their estate would pass not to her, but to her sons.

In the event of divorce, her husband would be assured custody of the children.

Abigail Scott Duniway challenged this sort of injustice in her 20 novels and hundreds of stories, essays, poems, and even songs.

She founded one of the region's most influential newspapers.

Jean: Only 1% of the editors of newspapers in the West were women.

- Duniway delivered thousands of public lectures on a variety of provocative subjects throughout the Northwest and across the country.

Debra: She was a tremendously popular lecturer and her talks drew great crowds - And she worked for more than four decades to win the right to vote for Oregon women.

Debra: Duniway envisioned a world in which everybody would be able to participate in truly equal fashion.

Everybody would be able to fulfill their human potential.

That meant really reworking society, rocking it to its foundations.

- Abigail Jean Scott was born in 1834 in the small community of Groveland, Illinois.

Jean: The Scott Home was always filled with newspapers and evidently with a number of books Debra: They read, newspapers that came in advocating the various sorts of reforms that were being talked about in that day.

So they were up on current events.

It was a rapidly changing world that she grew up in.

- In 1852 with Oregon Fever in full swing, her father loaded his family into ox drawn wagons and headed West.

His wife still in poor health from the birth of her 12th child opposed the 2,400 mile trek but to no avail.

17-year-old Abigail was charged with keeping a journal of the trip.

Voice reading: April 2nd.

It was a great trial to leave the home of my childhood.

The place where one cared to me was a stranger.

I was want to roam over hill and dale to wander alone to the sequestered grove, to hold communion unseen by mortal eye with a world of nature and of God.

Jean: What we read in that journal, what we sense is not only the uncertainty about what's going to be around the next bend but the struggle each day.

Voice reading: April 19th, the Cold Northwest wind blowed very disagreeable into our wagons all day, it made us feel willing to walk most of the time to keep warm Jean: And then tragedy in terms of who among their number died and had to be buried along the way.

Voice reading: June 20th.

We little thought when last Sabbath's pleasant sun shed upon us his congenial rays, that when the next would come, it would find us mourning over the sickness and death of our beloved mother.

Jean: A young man of 20 named John McDonald, who evidently was sweet on Jenny and she was sweet on him, drowned in a river accident during their travels.

Voice reading: The roaring of the river is no longer pleasant music to my ears, but is a jarring, discordant sound and these huge rocks which I then looked upon with admiration, now only terrify.

Debra: Abigail's mother died.

Her little brother died, but at the same time, there was a certain kind of freedom that the girls were able to enjoy on the trail, Abigail and her sisters that they would never have experienced if they had stayed back in their Illinois home.

Voice reading: When the mind is determined, it can do almost anything.

I left home with a firm determination to be contented, and I have succeeded so well that I cannot call myself anything but happy.

Jean: And at the end of the trail, they were in a new country where a lot of the restrictions that were often present on women in society were gone and there was open space that was created for things to begin to happen differently.

Jean: I believe that the early victories of the women's movement were in the West for good reason.

- Arriving in what was still Oregon territory, the Scott settled in Lafayette and Abigail taught school.

Within a year, at age 18, she had married a rancher named Ben Duniway.

They first lived on Ben's Clackamas County land claim, a place she named Hard Scrabble.

The children came soon and often and Abigail once nearly died in childbirth.

Life for a pioneer woman was tough.

- Washing, scrubbing, patching, darning ironing, plain sewing, raising babies, milking.

- She found herself cooking, sewing, and laundering for the hired hands too.

Debra:And she started thinking and she started fuming and she started writing and she was writing articles for the local newspapers that were expressing views about women's lives and women's roles in society.

- She wrote that overworked wives deserved hired help of their own, and she bemoaned the unhappy isolation endured by so many rural women.

Jean reading: We have ourselves lived during four consecutive winters upon a farm where for four months of each year we did not see the face of a woman.

Nobody need tell us that such a state of life is natural or right.

We know better.

Jean: That loneliness, that description of loneliness rang true for women throughout the Pacific Northwest.

- The Dunaway's saw their house destroyed by fire and a whole year's crops ruined by floods, but the worst disaster was the doing of Ben himself.

They had bought a new farm in Yamhill County as a favor to a friend.

Ben signed a note to the farm as collateral for a loan.

Abigail was powerless to stop him since their property was by law all his.

Not long afterward, the friend defaulted and the Duniway's lost it all Months later, as they struggled to get back on their feet, a wagon accident left Ben injured and unable to work.

And so Abigail Scott Duniway already a mother of four, became the family breadwinner as well.

She first returned to teaching then in a decision that would change the course of her life.

She opened a millinary shop in Albany.

Jean: There she learned about the real experiences of - Women.

Her customers told stories of cruelty and abandonment of husbands absconding with their wives money, or worse yet their children.

Jean: They had virtually no property rights.

They had virtually no education to support themselves.

Ultimately, she decided for herself after learning these women's stories that something needed to change.

And perhaps as she began to read more, the way to accomplish that change would be women's rights.

Voice reading: I was not an easy convert to equal suffrage.

I had been led from childhood to believe that women who demanded rights were man haters of whom I certainly was not one, but a long train of varied pioneer experiences led me at last into the light, which when it burst upon me, found me willing to take up the burden.

- In 1871, Abigail's family moved to Portland where her younger brother, Harvey Scott, edited the Oregonian newspaper.

There she founded a paper of her own, a journal for the people she called it.

That same year, she plunged into the fray of women's rights, inviting suffragists Susan B. Anthony to visit Oregon.

Thomas: They had been told as women in that time period that men would protect women, that boys were taught by parents to respect women, to help women in any way you could, not to prey upon women, but what both Anthony and Duniway found out from life's experiences.

This was not so many men would, would take advantage of women, that women had to stand up for themselves.

- The two women toured the Pacific Northwest speaking and organizing support for voting rights, often meeting with disdain from the local press.

Thomas reading: The woman's rights movement quote is worse than the smallpox and chills and fever combined.

Debra: People thought that women didn't have the psychological or physical capacities to be good voters.

Women were too emotional to some, they didn't have the intelligence or the rationality.

Jean reading: Women don't want to vote.

Woman's sphere is the home.

She would neglect her home if allowed to vote.

Women's ballot would weaken the home and make great trouble in the family.

And the political pool is far too filthy for women to dabble in.

The women who would vote are the bad women.

Women are frivolous and unreliable about business affairs too, fond of dress fashion, and parade to take interest in the affairs of state.

And if they gain the vote, supposedly they might sit on juries.

- During her travels with Susan B. Anthony, Duniway emerged as a skilled and effective public speaker herself.

Debra: She was very straightforward and very audacious and very strongly facetious.

Cutting on occasion, Thomas: You're gonna insult me out on such a back and and she did, which brought a lot of laughter among her supporters that that woman is pretty sharp.

- Duniway gave full voice to her experiences and ideas in the New Northwest, which she first published in May, 1871.

Voice Reading: Having reached the age of 36 and having brought up a family of boys to set type and a daughter to run the millinary store, we proposed to edit and publish a newspaper, and we intend to establish it as one of the permanent institutions of the country.

Jean: That weekly, 'The New Northwest' is a wonderful window, not only into the woman's suffrage struggle, women's rights struggle, but into life in the Northwest.

during that era.

- Abigail described for her inland readers her first dip in the ocean at age 40.

Voice Reading: You take a strange delight in watching the surf as it creeps murmuring toward you, shaking its white locks in your face as it approaches you.

Brace yourself and meet and conquer it, and watch it receding for a fresh onslaught while you stand your ground.

Victorious Jean: Duniway's newspaper carried writings by a number of women throughout the Pacific Northwest and gave all of these women an opportunity to express themselves in ways that most women did not have.

She filed regular reports of her frequent travels.

Jean: Those segments of editorial correspondence are rich, rich material for telling us about Oregon during that period of 1871 to 1887.

- The paper offered practical advice, newsy tidbits and articles gleaned from other newspapers as well as editorials and often very opinionated opinion pieces.

Voice reading: Dennis Kearney is a blatant blather guide who leads the sandlot rabble, a brazen braggart with a following of corner loafers, midnight ruffian sandbag garters flannel mouthed bog trotters, an adulterous political preachers.

- A typical edition also featured the latest chapter of one of Duniway's serialized novels, popular light reading with a message.

Jean: Most were said in the Pacific Northwest, and typically follow the life of a woman who faces a number of hardships and difficulties.

Duniway believed that these novels would reach more people than her speeches would, and that it was a good way to make women and men readers aware of the difficulties faced by women.

- During these years, several new laws improved the property rights and legal status of Oregon women.

Not coincidentally, Duniway had been a frequent visitor to the state legislature lobbying for some of those very changes.

In 1886, her only daughter Clara, died at age 32 of tuberculosis.

Abigail's heartbreak may have influenced her selling the New Northwest.

Several months later, after 16 years of publication In the early 1870s, Portland, Oregon had a saloon for every 60 people.

Debra: People really did drink a lot, particularly men hard liquor.

And because women did not have not just voting rights, but civil rights in the way that we understand them today, they were under the control of their husbands.

They suffered enormously on a variety of levels for a variety of reasons.

When they had husbands who suffered from alcoholism.

Alcohol abuse, and the problems it created were rampant.

Many women thought that was a more pressing issue than suffrage and believed outright prohibition of alcohol might be a good solution.

Many suffragists supported prohibition too.

This put them at odds with Duniway, who considered it intolerance and quackery.

Debra: That conflict created one of the greatest difficulties for Abigail Scott Duniway.

- She instead advocated individual responsibility, good judgment, and voluntary temperance.

Voice Reading: Force is not liberty, prohibition is not freedom.

- And she feared that if male voters identified suffrage with prohibition, women might never get the vote.

Woman's suffrage first appeared on an Oregon ballot in 1884 and was soundly defeated.

The liquor industry strongly opposed suffrage.

Thomas: Suffrage would mean closing down the saloons and maybe closing down breweries and distilleries.

Even complete prohibition might happen if women got the right to vote.

- And the now powerful editor of the Oregonian, Abigail's brother Harvey, had become a daunting adversary.

Thomas: I think he felt that there were a lot of under informed voters out there.

Bring women in, they'll be under informed too.

- Though, once supportive of his sister's work, Harvey now used his considerable influence to fight it.

Thomas: He just assumed that most women didn't want the right to vote.

- A second referendum went to voters in 1900.

In the days before the election, the Oregonian launched a scathing editorial attack on the suffrage measure.

Again, it failed to pass, but this time, by just 2000 votes, Voice reading: We would've won triumphantly.

if the Oregonian had not stirred up the slum and slime of the city's purviews corralling them to throw his bilge water on his own family from the ballot boxes.

- Fierce conflicts were also evolving between Abigail and the national suffrage leaders as they focused more attention on Oregon.

Disagreements over prohibition caused friction, and many of the Eastern women found Duniway, abrasive and obstinate.

She in turn, disapproved of their aggressive, highly visible campaign style.

Thomas: Duniway felt that the more noise you made before one of these referenda campaigns, the more likely you'd be defeated Voice reading: When working to win the ballot, there is, but one way by which we may hope to obtain it, and that is by and through the affirmative votes of men, we may theorize, organize, appeal, argue, coax, cajole, and threaten men till doomsday but all of this will avail us nothing unless they deposit their affirmative votes in the ballot box.

- In 1905, the National American Woman's Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony at the helm held its annual convention in Portland, Oregon.

Members outwardly downplayed their differences.

Public support for women's suffrage was on the rise.

Across town the heralded Lewis and Clark Centennial exhibition even declared an Abigail Scott Duniway day.

The next year, suffrage appeared on the Oregon ballot once more.

The active involvement of the national organization suggested a likely victory.

Yet in June, 1906, women's suffrage lost in Oregon.

For the third time.

Suffrage measures would fail twice more.

in Oregon.

All five defeats were driven by no votes in Portland.

In fact, as far back as 1884, suffrage consistently passed in most rural areas.

Thomas: I think a lot of people in these rural areas knew that grandma and mom or aunt had worked hard to develop the farm, the business, and and deserved the right to vote.

And also that their women relatives were more moral.

I mean, these women should not be denied.

Whereas these drunken saps up there in Portland, you know, in and out of the gutter, they can vote.

- By 1912 women had won suffrage in Washington and California and in four other states as well.

This year at last, male voters approved women's suffrage in Oregon.

Abigail Scott Duniway, who years earlier had been egged, derided and even hung in effigy, was now hailed as a hero.

Governor Oswald West and admire since childhood, put Mother Duniway on center stage.

She was the first Oregon woman to cast a ballot.

Women could now serve on juries too.

And within weeks, she received first summons.

Yet Duniway, though visibly aging and in failing health, now turned her efforts to other important unfinished business.

Women had the vote, but they did not yet enjoy real equality.

Debra: But everything wasn't better.

Abigail knew that, and that's why she didn't limit her focus to suffrage alone.

- Abigail Scott Duniway continued to campaign for national suffrage and equal rights for all women, right up to her death in 1915.

Voice reading: The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price.

It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth, still wider.

The debt that each generation owes to the past, it must pay to the future.

- There's more about Abigail Scott Duniway on Oregon Experience Online.

To learn more or to order a DVD or video cassette of the show, visit opb.org.

Funding for Oregon experience is provided by the James f and Marian l Miller Foundation, the Anne and Bill Swindells Charitable Trust, the Oregon Cultural Trust, and from viewers like you.

Thank you.