Abigail Jane Scott Duniway

• Abigail Duniway
• Born: October 22, 1834
• Died: October 11, 1915

Suffragist, was born on a farm near Groveland, Illinois. She was the second daughter of John Tucker Scott, a Kentuckian of Scottish and English descent, and Ann (Roelofson) Scott, also from Kentucky, of Danish and English descent. Of the nine Scott children who survived infancy, Abigail was the second. She was brought up as a Cumberland Presbyterian but became a Unitarian in adult life. She was educated at a local primary school.

In 1852, against the wishes of his wife, John Scott decided to migrate to Oregon. On the long and arduous trip overland both Ann Scott and the youngest son died. The family finally reached Lafayette, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where a new farm was hacked out of the wilderness.

The next year Abigail Scott married Benjamin Charles Duniway, a farmer who had also migrated from Illinois. The marriage produced a daughter, Clara Belle (born in 1854), and five sons: Willis Scott (1856), Hubert (1859), Wilkie Collins (1861), Clyde Augustus (1866), and Ralph Roelofson (1869).

In 1857 the family moved from Clackamas County to a farm near Lafayette, only to lose the farm in 1862 because it had been pledged as security for a friend of Benjamin Duniway who defaulted. Soon afterward, Benjamin Duniway was disabled in an accident that invalided him until his death in 1896. To support her husband and large family, Abigail Duniway opened a boarding school in Lafayette, then taught in a private school for a year in Albany, Oregon; finally, she ran a small millinery shop in Albany.

Her hard life on the farm, where she raised the children, kept house, cooked for the family and farmhands, and did the farm chores, made her ponder the lot of women. When the family moved to Albany, she met other women who told of their hard lives and of injustices worked on them.

Duniway thereupon became active in the nascent suffrage movement in the Northwest. In 1871, on a trip to San Francisco, she met suffrage leaders there, including Emily Pitts Stevens, publisher of The Pioneer, the first suffrage paper on the West Coast. Duniway, with the encouragement of her husband, who thought that women would not be able to protect themselves until they had the vote, moved the household to Portland and founded a weekly newspaper devoted to furthering women’s rights. The New Northwest, when it appeared on May 5, 1871, was greeted by “storms of ridicule.” But despite predictions of an early demise, it continued for sixteen years.

Duniway quickly expanded her activities to include political lobbying. In 1871 she helped found the Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association and in 1873 became its second president. In that capacity she attended sessions of the state legislature, where she presented petitions and spoke from the floor in behalf of women’s rights. Her efforts were important in obtaining passage of several measures giving married women greater personal and property rights.

In addition to publishing and lobbying, she became a frequent public speaker. Beginning in 1871, when she organized and presided over Susan B. Anthony’s tour of the Northwest, Duniway began speaking throughout Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Often she had an immediate impact on events, as in Washington Territory, where woman suffrage legislation was passed in 1883. Ironically, suffrage in Oregon was continually defeated at the polls, although it was supported by the legislature. Meanwhile, Duniway had become editor of a new weekly, Pacific Empire, which she made into an organ for her women’s rights program.

As she traveled and wrote, Duniway became increasingly critical of what she considered outside interference from the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was particularly upset by the tendency of NWSA officers and organizers to link suffrage with other reforms, especially temperance. In Duniway’s view, the tie with temperance only antagonized many men who would be willing to vote for suffrage alone. In any event, she argued, prohibition would follow automatically once women had the vote.

At a state temperance convention held around 1872, she chided the men in the audience for their inability to pass a state prohibition act. “Make women free,” she said, “give them the power the ballot gives you, and the control of their own earnings ... and every woman will be able to settle this prohibition business in her own home on her own account.” Accordingly, although she was a vice president of the NWSA (which in 1890 became the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association—NAWSA) she rarely cooperated with the organization and tended to go her own way.

In 1905, however, organizers from the NAWSA came into Oregon to quicken the pace of suffrage agitation. Duniway resigned from the state suffrage association and did not participate in the campaign for the 1906 elections. She saw her views apparently vindicated when the suffrage issue was again defeated at the polls, although two subsequent campaigns (in 1908 and 1910) led by her state association, without outside intervention, also failed. Success came only in 1912, by which time Duniway was too crippled with arthritis to assume direction of the campaign. She nevertheless received credit for her decades of work, wrote the suffrage proclamation, and became Oregon’s first registered woman voter.

Although her reform efforts were confined to the Pacific Northwest, she gradually acquired a national reputation and in 1893 addressed the Congress of Women at the Chicago World’s Fair. Locally, she was elected honorary president of the Oregon Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1899, and president of the Portland Woman’s Club in 1902. She died at eighty at her home in Portland and was buried there in River-view Cemetery.

Duniway’s life spanned eighty years, during which both the Northwest frontier and the rights of its women underwent major changes. Although she was often criticized for her refusal to cooperate with national women’s rights groups, it is universally acknowledged that she was the single most important worker in women’s rights in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

Despite her poor education, Duniway became one of the first novelists in the Northwest. Captain Gray’s Company (1859) was based on her experiences on the trip from Illinois, as was From the West to the West (1905). She published two books of poems, My Musings (1875) and David and Anna Matson (1876). These works are today much less read than Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (1914). In addition to the autobiography, useful material may be found in the autobiographical sketch quoted in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3 (1886). See also Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1930). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, October 12, 1915.