ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY

Abigail Jane Scott was born October 22, 1834 near Groveland, Illinois, to John Tucker Scott and Anne Roelofson, the third of twelve children. In 1852, she traveled on the Oregon Trail with her family. It was Abigail's duty to record the difficult trip in her journal. Her mother and youngest brother died along the route.

In 1853, Abigail married Benjamin C. Duniway, settling in Clackamas County, then Yamhill County, then to Albany. Nine years after their marriage, her husband's crippling injury made it necessary for Abigail to support her family, which included six children. She operated a women's hat shop in Albany, Oregon for many years. During this period Abigail grew more aware of the unequal treatment of men and women under the law.

She moved her family to Portland in 1871 and began publishing the New Northwest, a weekly newspaper that demanded equal rights for women. The motto of the paper was “Free Speech, Free Press, Free People”. In 1873 she helped found the Oregon State Women Suffrage Association. Her efforts as leader of the campaign for women's voting rights in the region enabled women to vote in Idaho in 1896 and in Washington in 1910.

But in Oregon, she witnessed five losses – in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908 and 1910 – before women gained the ballot in 1912. Her brother Harvey Scott was chief editor and part owner of the “Oregonian”, and he was instrumental in opposing his sister’s efforts. The Oregonian did not support women’s suffrage until 1912, two years after Harvey’s death.

Governor Oswald West asked her to write the Women’s Suffrage Proclamation in 1912 – the original, in her own hand is kept at the State Archives Building. Sadly, Abigail did not live to see national suffrage with the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1915.

In 1914, Ms. Duniway wrote:

"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."