Author to visit Vancouver, read from book on suffrage movement in Oregon

During the 1871 Oregon State Fair, two visiting VIPs were obliged to share a tent.

Susan B. Anthony hated it. Sleeping anywhere but a well-appointed private bedroom was a first for the renowned New York suffragist. A famously outspoken, righteous and stern social reformer, she had no interest in adventures like sleeping on the ground.

When Anthony came west on a lecture tour, she met her polar opposite in a rough-and-ready survivor who’d suffered her way along the Oregon Trail in 1852. Abigail Scott Duniway may have emigrated from Illinois to Yamhill County, but she became a true pioneer Oregonian — homesteading and farming, starting a school and running a store. When her husband was severely disabled in a farming accident, she took on his labors; when she was traveling the Oregon Trail, she endured her mother and her little brother both succumbing to what was called “plains cholera.”

In her autobiography, Duniway recalled her mother weeping after giving birth to yet another girl: “Poor baby! She’ll be a woman someday! Poor baby! A woman’s lot is so hard!”

According to author Jennifer Chambers, Duniway’s remarkable can-do spirit was animated by her mother’s sorrow — and by the tales of male unfairness and cruelty that she heard from women who shopped in her store. Chambers’ short new book with a long title, “Abigail Scott Duniway and Susan B. Anthony in Oregon: Hesitate No Longer,” traces how the lesser-known suffragist cultivated an uneasy alliance with her famous heroine, and spent the bulk of her life fighting for women’s rights.

‘Fan girl’

Chambers, a native Oregonian, will visit Vintage Books in Vancouver on April 28 to read from the book, which represents a survivor’s personal triumph for her, too. When she was 15, Chambers said, she suffered a serious brain injury in a car accident. She lost all her memories and had to relearn how to do everything, she said. Reading was easier than speaking as she relearned language, she said. And as she struggled to rebuild herself, she found it natural to “reach for stories of women who overcame obstacles in real life. That was inspiring to me.”

Chambers became a speaker and writer on women’s issues, and started researching remarkable Oregon women. “I was really drawn to Abigail’s story. She literally brought herself back to life, again and again,” she said.

The story got even better as she read Duniway’s diaries and discovered her idolization of Anthony. “It makes her very human,” Chambers said. “She was like a fan girl stalking Susan B. Anthony, except there was no Facebook. She followed all her writings. Then they started having a relationship by mail.” Around the same time, Duniway moved her family to Portland, helped form the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association and launched her own suffragist newspaper, The New Northwest. (Her brother, meanwhile, became an early publisher of The Oregonian, which railed against women’s rights.)

Finally, Chambers said, Duniway “engineered it to meet Anthony at a women’s conference in San Francisco.” Anthony was traveling with her own mentor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but Stanton returned east while Anthony accepted Duniway’s invitation to bring her lecture tour north.

Sin cities

In the summer of 1871, Portland was a rough young timber-port town, widely considered “sin city,” Chambers writes. Anthony’s journey there was miserable, but she was driven by deep belief in her mission — and by the massive debt of her own New York City suffragist newspaper, The Revolution. She was desperate to sell subscriptions and lecture tickets, so she came to Portland and claimed top billing, with Duniway speaking second. It was a step up for both.

The pair of passionate lecturers were either “quickly successful,” or “infamous,” Chambers writes. “At times, trash and rotted fruit were thrown at the two women, targets as they were.”

They may have drawn some missiles, but the pair mostly drew interested crowds, Chambers writes: “The 35-day trip went from Portland for three days, to Salem, northwest to Oregon City, Milwaukie and then back to Portland. Then they sailed on the Columbia River up to The Dalles, Umatilla, Wallula and Walla Walla. South to Albany and Corvallis, and then northwest up to Monmouth, Dayton, Lafayette, McMinnville and Forest Grove.”

They were tailed by one dedicated detractor who’s mostly forgotten now, Chambers adds: one Mrs. J. Blakesley Forst, who followed them from stop to stop with her own fiery anti-suffrage speeches — but reportedly didn’t draw much audience. Meanwhile, Duniway wrote a gushing letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton about Anthony’s power over crowds, saying that “her fund of logic, fact and fun seems inexhaustible” and “we find the people everywhere enthusiastic and delighted.”

Rainy days

Next came the 1871 Oregon State Fair, where those rough accommodations threw the differences between Duniway and Anthony into stark relief. In her newspaper, Duniway described the fair like an excited child, teeming with noise and excitement and even “magic portals” to 50-cent attractions; Anthony, meanwhile, griped about being “packed side by side like herrings” in a tent with the whole Duniway family.

“Anthony hated being there,” Chambers said. “They didn’t have to be best friends. They didn’t necessarily agree on everything, but their networking reminds me of women networking today.”

Anthony continued to hate the Pacific Northwest — the primitive wagon paths, the rain, the resistance — as the duo rode north through western Washington to Olympia, where the territorial Legislature voted, 18-8, to invite Anthony to speak. That was followed by the formation of the Washington Women’s Suffrage Association, which so worried the Legislature, Chambers writes, that it voted never to extend suffrage to local women until the whole nation did so.

Anthony’s Olympia speech made waves, but her return to Portland was rainy and melancholy. “Terrible depression of spirit with feeling of impossibility to mark this last speech in Portland,” she wrote in her diary on Nov. 15, 1871. Then she returned to California, while the vibrant and driven Duniway developed new strategies for pressing the fight in Oregon.

“The thing that was so important to me was to write about how these two women created a network,” Chambers said. “It connected east and west in a way that the movement for women’s rights really hadn’t done before. Even though they weren’t able to see their own successes, necessarily, they set something in motion. Their incredible persistence was invaluable.”