Kimberly Jensen

"Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign"

Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912

IN FEBRUARY 1913, Oregon suffragist, physician, and public health activist Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy summed up Oregon's 1912 woman suffrage victory for the Woman's Progressive Weekly: "It was pre-eminently a campaign of young women, impatient of leadership, and they worked just about as they liked — and that is how they will vote. There was certainly neither head nor tail to the campaign." Lovejoy cited the independent work of a number of suffrage groups, the support of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), positive press coverage, the impact of visiting speakers, and the diverse activities of Oregonians for the cause. "There were lunches, dinners and talks here and there and everywhere," she wrote, "and a continuous distribution of literature. Oregon women worked during this campaign as they never did before — and the returns showed clearly that where they worked they won."¹ Pohl Lovejoy was at the center of much of this activity. Her assessment of the vital role of a coalition of independent, diverse suffrage groups and the impact of modern mass advertising and public relations outlines key areas of historical investigation and analysis for the 1912 victory.

By 1912, important developments in the long history of women's quest for voting rights in Oregon suggested the possibility of a successful campaign. Oregon women had what Pohl Lovejoy called a "local grievance:" they were voteless but surrounded by suffrage states. Women had achieved the vote in Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), and California (1911), and it appeared that the Republic of China would grant suffrage to women.² Abigail Scott Duniway, the veteran but domineering first-generation suffrage leader of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, had lost most local and national support by 1912 and was bedridden most of the campaign. The Washington and California victories — based on new strategies of mass media and advertising — may have influenced Oregon suffragists to reject Duniway's passive campaign style known as the "still hunt," which favored behind-the-scenes work among elite male leaders and avoided public debate or discussion.³ The ideas and new style of activism of Pohl Lovejoy and other Portland campaigners were significant contributions to victory. The 1912 Oregon campaign may have succeeded because of the strength of independent organizations with "neither head nor tail to the campaign," the ability of those like Pohl Lovejoy to form coalitions for action in spite of conflicts, and the effectiveness of modern mass advertising. This study will address these issues surrounding the 1912 campaign with a primary focus on Portland, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, and her suffrage activism.⁴

Suffrage campaigners — including Esther Pohl Lovejoy, holding the "Votes for Women" umbrella, and W.M. "Pike" Davis, sitting in the front passenger seat — promote their cause during the June 1912 Portland Rose Festival with Votes for Women banners and flags, which were used throughout the winning campaign.

Courtesy Amy Khedouri Collection, Scottsdale, Arizona

ESTHER CLAYSON WAS BORN in 1869 in a logging camp in Seabeck, Washington Territory, to immigrant English parents. From an early age, she and her brothers worked in the family's boarding house and hotel and, later, in their hotel and restaurant when the family moved to East Portland in the 1880s. At eighteen, Esther started work as a clerk, earning twenty dollars a month at the Lipman and Wolfe department store to help support herself and her mother and younger sisters. In 1890, inspired by early women physicians practicing in Portland and the promise of interesting and remunerative work, she began the three-year course of study at the University of Oregon Medical Department (UOMD). Her funds ran out after the end of the first term, however, and she took a year off to return to department store employment. "There were no scholarships to be won," she recalled, "and 18 months behind hosiery and underwear counters was the price of my last two terms."⁵ Those years gave Esther a labor consciousness and a concern for the needs of workers that she retained throughout her life.

The University of Oregon Medical Department building, where Esther Clayson attended classes during her last years of study, was located at NW Twenty-third and Lovejoy from 1892 through 1919.

Courtesy OHSU Historical Collections & Archives

The University of Oregon Medical Department, Esther later remembered, "suited" her "exactly." "It was a pioneer institution," she noted, "unhampered by a past, but with a boundless future." "None of the boys [at UOMD] threw eggs at us," she said, contrasting her experience with women of a previous generation who fought for a place at eastern establishment medical colleges and battled hazing rituals from male students.⁶ In the 1890 term, Esther joined a class of twenty students, including two other women, and became the first UOMD woman graduate to practice medicine.⁷ Esther completed her coursework in 1894 as the winner of the H.A. Wall Prize for the highest aggregate score in anatomy, physiology, materia medica, and chemistry. Three weeks after graduation, she marred her classmate Emil Pohl.⁸ Esther and Emil divided their time between Portland and Alaska as Emil became involved with the gold rush and mining interests in addition to medicine. After their son Freddie was born in 1901, they negotiated marriage and work in Portland in combination with Emil's home base in Fairbanks. Esther's mother, Annie Clayson, came to live with the family in their east Portland home on Williams Avenue in 1904 and assisted with child care as Esther pursued her medical practice and attended post-graduate clinical studies in Vienna, Austria.⁹

Esther Clayson married Emil Pohl, her classmate at the University of Oregon Medical Department, several weeks after her graduation in April 1894. He died in 1911.

OHS neg., CN 013950

In August 1905, newly elected progressive Portland mayor Harry Lane, also a medical doctor, appointed Esther to be one of three physicians on the Portland Board of Health. Two years later, her colleagues on the health board and the mayor elected her unanimously as Portland City Health Officer, a position she filled until Lane left office in 1909. The $3,000–a-year policy making position made her the first woman to head a health bureau of a major U.S. city.¹⁰ Pohl participated in the Oregon suffrage campaigns of 1906 and 1912, using her experiences in public policy and public health to argue that women needed the vote so that they could enact laws for healthier and safer communities. This was also a time of personal loss and change. In September 1908, her son died from septic peritonitis, a condition Pohl attributed to tainted milk.¹¹ Almost three years later, Emil died in Fairbanks from spinal meningitis.¹² In 1912, in the midst of the suffrage campaign, Pohl married Portland businessman and suffrage supporter George A. Lovejoy. They would divorce in 1920.¹³

Esther Pohl poses with her son, Frederick Clayson Pohl (1901–1908). Freddie spent time at his mother's office in City Hall and rode a suffrage float in the 1906 Made in Oregon parade.

OHS neg., OrHi 28006

Esther Pohl developed as a physician and public health advocate in the midst of a supportive community of women physicians, progressive-era women's organizations, and women activists.¹⁴ The first women had graduated from the Willamette University Medical Department in Salem in 1877, and the male members of the Oregon State Medical Society voted to accept women to membership that same year. The Portland society was more resistant and did not admit women until 1892, two years before Pohl's graduation. As a practicing physician, Pohl became an active member.¹⁵ From 1905 to 1920, women made up from 7 to 8 percent of Oregon's physicians, one of the highest percentages of any state and well above the national average of 3 to 4 percent.¹⁶ Portland's women physicians organized the Medical Club of Portland in 1900, and Pohl was involved from the beginning. Members presented scientific papers and clinical cases and strengthened their bonds with social activities. Pohl's colleagues elected her president of the society in 1905.¹⁷ The support of these women physicians was vital to her work on the city health board. She also found support from members of women's organizations such as the Portland Woman's Club and the Council of Jewish Women, who encouraged Pohl's health bureau initiatives, including the inspection of school children for contagious diseases, milk inspection and safe drinking water, and the prevention of bubonic plague. "Whenever we have had a particularly hard piece of business touching the health of the community," Pohl insisted, "we have called upon the women's organizations to help." The "help and co-operation of the womens' [sic] organizations," she concluded, was crucial for the success of public health measures.¹⁸

Dr. Esther C. Pohl (seated at left), head of Portland's Health Department, was photographed with the staff of the health office in 1907.

Courtesy OHSU Historical Collections & Archives

Chicago suffragist Ruth Hanna McCormick once asked Pohl why she was in favor of votes for women. Pohl supplied four reasons. The first, she said, was "simply because it is right ... every honest, intelligent and sane person who has considered the subject carefully is a suffragist." Her second reason was personal, and she recounted how she was denied an internship from the University of Oregon Medical Department because of her sex. Then "personal observations in the city service" further "crystallized" her principles. When bubonic plague threatened "the commerce of the city" in 1907–1908, the city council promptly supported her actions as city health officer. "But for several years the women of this city were unable to secure any protection," she complained, remembering when "hundreds of little children" died from "an impure milk supply."¹⁹ This direct effect of gender discrimination led her to conclude that empowerment through the vote for all women was necessary for civic health and progress. Even women in public office did not have the power to promote key issues without a city populated by women voters.

Pohl's fourth reason was the direct "influence of the National Woman's Suffrage Convention held at Portland in 1905."²⁰ That year, Portland hosted over a million and a half visitors at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, hoping to showcase the city's economic promise, abundant resources, and comfortable living. Like many national organizations, the NAWSA and the American Medical Association (AMA) held their annual meetings in Portland that summer. The AMA meeting followed by just a few days the gathering of the national suffrage association, and many women physicians attended both conventions. NAWSA president and physician Anna Howard Shaw and other visiting suffragists also remained for the AMA meeting. NAWSA leaders invited Pohl, then president of the Portland Medical Women's Club, to represent the medical women of the nation in a convention speech on June 30, 1905. The Portland Woman's Club, of which Pohl was a member, hosted "a large evening reception," and there were many opportunities for meetings, networking, and socializing. This strategic NAWSA convention launched the 1906 Oregon suffrage campaign.²¹

Esther Pohl was a key contributor to the 1906 campaign. Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of NAWSA's Woman's Journal, referred to her as a "tower of strength" who worked "indefatigably" for the initiative.²² As president of the Portland Woman's Medical Association, Pohl joined a coalition of women's organizations in public support of the suffrage cause. She gave speeches, wrote editorials, and arranged for a suffrage entry in the Made in Oregon parade in May, using a carriage filled with children (including her own four-year-old Freddie) with the slogan "Future Voters — Made in Oregon."²³

Pohl's friendship with Anna Shaw, which had begun the summer before at the NAWSA and AMA conventions, deepened to comradeship when Shaw came to Oregon in April 1906 and remained through the June election. Shaw was a skilled orator who had an approachable, humorous style; she worked tirelessly at meetings and gatherings, cultivated the press, and traveled for the cause. Pohl hosted a reception for Shaw on April 3 to inaugurate a statewide suffrage conference, and in May she arranged for Shaw to address the annual meeting of the Oregon State Medical Society in Eugene on the subject of public health and suffrage. On Election Day, Pohl organized women to distribute suffrage literature outside polling places in Portland. Shaw remembered that "all day long Dr. Pohl took me in her automobile from one polling-place to another" to distribute "sandwiches, courage and inspiration" in a "drenching" Oregon rain.²⁴

The 1906 campaign met defeat, which historians attribute to the strong, well-financed opposition of liquor and business interests and their strategic use of the press and public relations. They also stress the underlying conflicts among local suffragists and with national leaders, with Abigail Scott Duniway placed at the center of the controversies. NAWSA leaders had displaced Duniway from formal direction of the 1906 campaign, but she still participated and later identified NAWSA outsiders, the links between prohibition and woman suffrage, and an active rather than her preferred passive campaign style as the reasons for defeat. At the November 1906 annual meeting of the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association (OSESA), in a highly publicized and polarized election, Duniway successfully prevented a change in direction, regained the presidency, and established a slate of supportive board members.²⁵ This split would diminish the ranks of active local suffrage participants until 1912.

Esther Pohl had this portrait taken during the years of her suffrage and public health activism in Portland.

Courtesy OHSU Historical Collections & Archives

In the wake of the campaign, Duniway's relations with national suffragists became acrimonious. In the spring of 1907, she told the press that she had received signed statements from NAWSA leaders and organizers "acknowledging their mistakes in coming to Oregon," but in fact they had made no such admission.²⁶ She engaged in angry correspondence with national leaders, blaming them for the defeat, and they were understandably wary when Duniway asked the NAWSA board to contribute $2,000 for the 1908 campaign in Oregon, to be used "as needed." Anna Shaw replied that it would be contrary to NAWSA board policy to contribute to a state campaign without oversight. Duniway retorted that NAWSA owed the OSESA the funds "to assist us in our way after you ... so signally failed (as the National has always done) in yours." She threatened to sell the correspondence between herself and NAWSA leaders, contending that she could raise $500 for the publicity value of the negative exchanges it contained.²⁷

Duniway's loss of national support and her insistence on controlling the Oregon suffrage debate resulted in declines in local support for both the 1908 and 1910 campaigns. By October 1, 1908, OSESA membership had sunk to just 66, from an estimated 300 campaign committees with some 6,000 members in 1906.²⁸ Support declined even further in 1910, when Duniway put forward a taxpayers' equal suffrage initiative that retained the age and residency requirements for voting but stated that "no citizen who is a taxpayer shall be denied the right to vote on account of sex."²⁹ Socialists and progressives, members of labor unions and other workers, and many women and men who considered themselves suffragists opposed the measure because of its class-based approach, which privileged women who held property. As Anna Howard Shaw phrased it, Duniway was "head, tail, and middle" of these 1908 and 1910 campaigns, and active work for the measures appears to have come only from Duniway and her dwindling number of supporters.³⁰ The election totals also tell the story. In 1906, statewide votes in favor of suffrage were 44 percent of the total; in 1908, supporters dropped to 39 percent; and in 1910 (the year woman suffrage won in Washington State), supporters made up only 37 percent of voters.³¹

Esther Pohl was not active in the controversial 1908 and 1910 campaigns, but she corresponded and visited with her suffrage mentor, Anna Howard Shaw. On her return to the States from clinical study in Vienna in 1910, Pohl stayed with Shaw and Shaw's partner Lucy Anthony in Pennsylvania and attended suffrage gatherings with them in New York. In January 1911, during Pohl's stay with her sister in Boise, Idaho, she and Shaw corresponded about healing, writing about Freddie's death and some medical advice Pohl had given Shaw, but they also worried over the "scars which never can be healed." And they exchanged information about and discussed strategies for the 1912 suffrage campaign in Oregon. Both were concerned about Duniway's continued leadership. In March 1911, Shaw wrote that she hoped the recent suffrage victory in Washington State would mean success for Oregon, "provided that there is any sort of campaign," but she doubted "if it is possible with Mrs. Duniway."³² The two women also wrestled with Pohl's need to devote time to her medical practice while also contributing to the cause. It would be this relationship and continuing correspondence that provided the foundation for the NAWSA/Oregon connection during the 1912 campaign.

AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL, the 1912 election was the "Great Campaign" that sparked a "magnificent debate" in which progressives and radicals vied with conservatives for the power to direct the nation's policies and economy. Progressive Republican Robert La Follette challenged William Howard Taft for the nomination, and Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Progressive third-party candidate. Socialist Eugene Debs received over 900,000 votes, but Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic victor, battled them all to define the U.S. response to business interests and the needs of workers. Debs's strong showing, particularly in the West, John Milton Cooper concludes, suggests that "the Democrats and Progressives had failed to satisfy radical yearnings in 1912."³³ In Oregon, as in other western states, strong Socialist and Progressive movements invigorated electoral politics and, as Rebecca Edwards demonstrates, "helped to bring renewed gains for women's political rights."³⁴

Abigail Scott Duniway prepared early for the 1912 campaign. As president of the OSESA, she directed the petition drive that secured the requisite number of signatures for an equal suffrage initiative for the ballot by December 20, 1910, almost two years in advance.³⁵ At their January 1911 meeting, Duniway and her OSESA passed a resolution appealing to the Oregon legislature to support the initiative. She presented the memorial in person, and the Oregon House and Senate passed their recommendation as Senate Joint Resolution No. 12 (House Concurrent Resolution No. 24) on February 17, 1911.³⁶ The stage was set for the work to begin. Many women urged Duniway to begin an active campaign, but she opted to wait, preferring her "still hunt" strategy of working privately with influential men without "alerting" the opposition. Anna Shaw finally wrote "a very strong letter to some of the women" in December 1911, "severely criticizing" them for the "lack of preparation for this campaign."³⁷ The letter was a catalyst for action.

W.M. "Pike" Davis, president of the Men's Equal Suffrage Club of Multnomah County (originally published in Montague Colmer, History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon, in 1910)

The Men's Equal Suffrage Club of Multnomah County came into being on January 3, 1912, joining over a dozen men's suffrage leagues in other states as well as national and international leagues. Some 59 percent of the identified members were lawyers, most of them actively involved in political life — such as Will Daly, president of the Oregon State Federation of Labor; Dan Malarkey, the Republican state senator who would be senate president in 1913; and progressive People's Power League activist Alfred Cridge —and who apparently were betting on a woman suffrage victory that year.³⁸ In her welcoming speech to the group, Abigail Scott Duniway praised the men and predicted victory.³⁹ The Men's Club remained active throughout the campaign, sustained by the effective and engaged leadership of their president, former deputy city attorney W.M. "Pike" Davis, who also served as legal adviser for the other suffrage organizations. The press made much of the forty-six-year-old Davis's "headlong dive out of the Bachelor Club" when he married Etta M. Blatchley in the midst of the campaign in June 1912 and became stepfather to her four young daughters. "'Pike' admitted today," the Portland Evening Telegram reported on the front page, "that he probably never would have gotten married if he hadn't become a convert to women's suffrage."⁴⁰

A second influential group, the Portland Equal Suffrage League (PESL), formed in early January 1912 under the direction of Portland society leader and clubwoman Josephine Mayer Hirsch, the wealthy widow of successful merchant and politician Solomon Hirsch. Educated at St. Mary's Academy in Portland, Hirsch was active in the Portland Section of the National Council of Jewish Women, a major supporter of the Council's Neighborhood House Settlement in the city, and a member of the executive board of the National Council of Jewish Women. To inaugurate the new PESL, Hirsch invited some two hundred prominent guests to her home on January 11 — "Nearly everybody that pretends to be anybody was there," the Portland Evening Telegram reported — to hear a suffrage address by British actor J. Forbes-Robertson, then on tour.⁴¹ As Sarah Evans later recalled, many wealthy society women in Portland had opposed suffrage, and Hirsch's activism was crucial. Hirsch "went directly into the camp of the enemy and organized a group of society women," Evans asserted. "No one feature [of the campaign] stands out more conspicuously for results" than the gathering for Forbes-Robertson. Some of the guests were suffrage leaders such as Esther Pohl, but most "were radical anti-suffragists" who "went away converts."⁴² With a membership of over three hundred, the PESL would be one of the most active suffrage organizations in Portland. The Oregon Journal later reported that there was "a telephone plug in every room in [Hirsch's] mansion, so that a servant could get incoming suffrage calls to her, wherever she might be."⁴³

Josephine Mayer Hirsch was president of the Portland Equal Suffrage League.

Oregon Jewish Musuem, Portland, Nelson Family Archive, courtesy Don Nelson

Just a day after Hirsch's gathering, the Portland Woman's Club took on Anna Howard Shaw's call for action and endorsed woman suffrage. Club president Dora Espey (Mrs. A. King) Wilson appointed Esther Pohl, Sarah Evans, and Elizabeth Avery (Mrs. Frederick) Eggert as members of the Portland Woman's Club Campaign Committee (PWCCC).⁴⁴ The decision might be "a matter of some surprise," Sarah Evans wrote in her regular Sunday column for the Oregon Journal, because club members had been divided on the suffrage question in the past. But the club, she wrote, had moved beyond the "self-improvement days," was now in touch with the "larger things in life," and had joined other organizations in supporting this "advanced step in the progress of civilization."⁴⁵ Abigail Scott Duniway, a member who attended the club meeting that day, felt she had been trumped. She wrote to Evans, who was also the president of the Oregon State Federation of Women's Clubs, complaining about the "secrecy" of the resolution; she was "sorry," she charged, that Evans had "thought it necessary to side-track the wheel-horse-and-leader of the Cause."⁴⁶ Evans, a colleague of Pohl's as market inspector for the City of Portland and Pohl's longtime friend, would become one of the strongest opponents to Duniway's leadership in the campaign.

Esther Pohl sent a letter and telegram to NAWSA headquarters to tell Shaw about the PWCCC. Shaw responded, saying she was delighted with the "promise that you and Mrs. Evans would take a personal oversight of the work of the committee." She understood that neither Evans nor Pohl could leave their occupations for full-time suffrage work, but she was "perfectly satisfied" that the PWCCC would work as a board, "taking turns" at general oversight with a headquarters and strong secretary to maintain it. Pohl could "depend upon me for the two hundred dollars a month for the campaign work through your committee." The money came from a fund donated to Shaw "by a friend to be used in any way I felt would be most helpful to the campaigns," and that distinction gave her the ability to contribute to the campaign without it having NAWSA oversight. Finally, Shaw wrote, "I think we are all perfectly willing that Mrs. Duniway should bear [the] heavy burden of glory and credit if she will only give us the chance to do the work."⁴⁷

Over the next several weeks, Portland women organized new suffrage groups, and suffrage received important endorsements. Charlotte Anita Whitney, president of the College Equal Suffrage League of California, and Helen Hoy Greeley, lawyer and member of the New York Equal Suffrage League, came to the city as part of an organizing tour of the state. The College League had been a key component of the California victory and represented a general shift to a new generation of suffragists and modern campaign tactics.⁴⁸ There was such a strong response to early meetings that February that Whitney and Greeley scheduled more lectures at the Woman's Press Club and homes of supporters.⁴⁹ Pohl and PWCCC members sponsored a mass meeting featuring addresses by Whitney and Greeley and local suffragists Sara Bard Field Ehrgott and Sara Evans, with a discussion led by Pohl. Whitney and Greeley worked with local suffragists to form a Portland chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL). Esther Pohl and many other Portland women joined the organization, and Whitney remained in Portland as an active worker for the rest of the campaign.⁵⁰ At first, Duniway protested the outsiders' presence, insisting that they would "kill the whole campaign." But when it became clear that the women enjoyed strong support, she made an abrupt about-face and organized a reception for the women at the Hotel Portland "in the name of the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association." She agreed to serve as the honorary president of the CESL.⁵¹

PORTLAND AREA SUFFRAGE ORGANIZATIONS, 1912

American Woman's League and Republic, Rose City Chapter

Arleta Equal Suffrage Association

Boys' Booster Club of Portland

Business Woman's Suffrage League

Chinese American Equal Suffrage Society

Civic Progress Circles

College Equal Suffrage League, Portland Branch (CESL)

Colored Women's Equal Suffrage Association (CWESA)

Equal Suffrage Lyceum League

Everybody's Equal Suffrage League

Men's Equal Suffrage Club of Multnomah County

Milwaukee-Oak Grove Equal Suffrage League

Mt. Tabor Equal Suffrage League

Oregon Junior Booster Club

Oregon State Central Suffrage Campaign Committee

Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association (OSESA)

Portland Equal Suffrage League (PESL)

Portland Woman's Club Campaign Committee (PWCCC)

Quaker Equal Suffrage Society of Portland

Sellwood Equal Suffrage Club

Stenographers' Equal Suffrage League

Woman's Political Equality League

Woman's Political Science Club

ENDORSING ORGANIZATIONS

Central Labor Council

Central Portland Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Multnomah County WCTU

Oregon Civic League

Oregon Socialist Party (Branch 4)

Oregon State Federation of Labor

Oregon State Grange

Oregon State Woman's Press Club

Sources: Portland Evening Telegram, Oregon Journal, Oregonian, Pacific Grange Bulletin, Portland Labor Press, Portland News, Portland Spectator, Woman's Journal, and "Oregon Suffrage Associations," NAWSA Records, Library of Congress.
compiled by the author

During these same weeks, Portland women organized the Business Woman's Suffrage League and the Woman's Political Science Club to prepare women to use their vote once they had it.⁵² Suffrage was a topic at several meetings of Portland area chapters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Oregon Civic League formed a suffrage committee, and progressive Portland lawyer C.E.S. Wood spoke on "The Woman Question, Social and Political" at a meeting of the Modern School Society at Christensen's Hall.⁵³ The Oregon State Federation of Labor, led by President Will Daly, endorsed woman suffrage at its annual convention held January 15–18, 1912, at The Dalles.⁵⁴

Efforts to coordinate and facilitate this wave of activity led to conflict. Representatives from the five major Portland suffrage organizations —PWCCC, PESL, CESL, Men's Club, and OSESA — formed the Equal Suffrage Advisory Committee, with "Pike" Davis as chair, and pledged to work together for their common goal.⁵⁵ Duniway, in the first weeks of an illness that would claim her for the rest of the campaign, was unable to attend the meeting; but she sent trusted OSESA member E. May (Mrs. Arthur) Newill with a letter demanding that all "auxiliary" groups must be under the authority of the OSESA (and, by extension, of Duniway herself), that all dues must be paid directly to her organization, and that all groups "must report regularly" to 292 Clay Street (Duniway's home), where the "state president [Duniway] has donated parlors."⁵⁶ It is clear that Duniway wanted to maintain control of the process and the purse.

After the meeting, two longtime Duniway supporters, Viola Coe and Dr. Marie Equi, refused to have the CESL participate in the advisory group and called a meeting to organize an alternative central committee. Equi claimed that the meeting that created the advisory committee was "not official inasmuch as it was not called by Mrs. Duniway."⁵⁷ The result was the formation of a rival Oregon State Central Campaign Committee, with Duniway selecting the representatives from each "auxiliary" suffrage group.⁵⁸ At the same time, PWCCC members withdrew from the rival committee, stating that the goal of their group was "work and not contention."⁵⁹ When Shaw received Pohl's telegram reporting these developments, she wrote that "I expected ... that as soon it was known that the money was received there would be an eager scramble for it.... the one thing to do is to ignore the fact that there is any trouble and go right straight ahead as if there were none...." Shaw continued: "Whenever it is possible for you to co-operate with Mrs. Dunniway [sic] do so, show her any courtesy you can, put on her brow a halo or a laurel wreath or an Eagle plume if possible, but keep the money to push the work."⁶⁰

With the extensive publicity about the woman suffrage campaign and the now-established Portland pattern of independent suffrage groups — and perhaps also as a result of these conflicts over campaign organization and tactics — suffrage supporters continued to create Portland leagues, which would number twenty-three by the end of the campaign.⁶¹ These diverse suffrage organizations created a context in which many women and some men worked for the cause, perhaps taking on more active roles in this work because of the decentralized, multi-organizational structure. The variety of organizations and the pragmatic need to address male voters also meant the possibility of limited, yet significant cooperation across lines of race and class. Duniway's illness, the conflicts over financial backing and power, and the view among many suffragists that this campaign needed to be different from previous ones all contributed to the diversity of suffrage groups rather than a single-organization movement. And each group could tailor its message to its specific audience and community to rally the maximum number of male voters to the cause. This may also be a reason why the prohibition/anti-prohibition conflicts were not a strong element of the 1912 campaign: there were many other arguments and issues and organizations at hand.

In Portland, there were neighborhood-based groups such as the Milwaukee-Oak Grove and the Sellwood Equal Suffrage Leagues and groups representing special interests among suffragists such as the Stenographer's League and the Quaker Society. The Rose City Chapter of the American Women's League and Republic linked Portland with this national woman's educational and suffrage organization. The PWCCC corresponded with seventy suffrage organizations across the state, and Portland-area newspapers reported on fifty-seven leagues and clubs statewide.⁶² Other non-suffrage organizations — including Portland's Central Labor Council, the Socialist Party of Oregon, the Oregon State Grange, and the State Woman's Press Club — joined the State Federation of Labor, the Civic League, and the WCTU with official endorsements of suffrage, lending strength, legitimacy, and publicity to the campaign. The support of these groups and the active role of C.E.S. Wood, Will Daly, Alfred Cridge, and others provide evidence that, contrary to Robert Johnston's assertion, direct democrats and suffragists made alliances to support suffrage in 1912.⁶³

In May, members of the three-month-old Colored Women's Council of Portland organized the Colored Women's Equal Suffrage Association (CWESA). The association was open to women who were members of Portland's African American churches — First African Episcopal Methodist Zion Church, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Mount Olivet Baptist, and First African Baptist — "with the object of spreading equal suffrage ideas among those of the race."⁶⁴ Katherine Gray served as the first president, with Mrs. Lancaster the vice president and Edith Gray the treasurer. Hattie Redmond was the organization's first secretary and later served as president. Across the campaign, CWESA members attended lectures by leaders of the African American community and also invited white suffragists to speak, including Esther Pohl, Viola Coe, and Sara Bard Field Ehrgott.⁶⁵ When Pohl spoke at a public meeting in September at Mount Olivet Baptist, Hattie Redmond explained to the Oregonian that "the meeting had not been sufficiently advertised to bring out a large attendance," but the reporter noted that "those present were enthusiastic for the cause."⁶⁶

Portland's CWESA was among "hundreds of African American women's clubs mobilized for the vote" in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it mirrored national trends in members' club and church associations.⁶⁷ Although national and local discrimination had barred African American women in Portland from membership in white women's clubs since 1902, the CWESA was included in the broader suffrage coalitions of Portland in the 1912 campaign.⁶⁸ A CWESA representative served on the Central Campaign Committee, and mainstream Portland newspapers included information about the CWESA's activities with other suffrage events. At the August 1 meeting of the Central Campaign Committee, the group announced that it had doubled its membership and "that the editor of their paper, the Advocate, favored the movement."⁶⁹ Significantly, proclamations issued in November 1912 before the suffrage victory on behalf of "Presidents of all the suffrage organizations in Portland" and after the election by the Central Campaign Committee included Hattie Redmond and the CWESA.⁷⁰ While the decentralized, multi-organizational nature of the 1912 campaign did not eliminate racism against African American suffragists, in Portland it appears that it did create conditions of partial coalition-building and participation.⁷¹

Hattie Redmond served as president of the Colored Women's Equal Suffrage Association (CWESA).

OHS neg., ba017787

Timing and circumstances also promoted limited interracial activism among white and Chinese American suffragists in Portland during the campaign. With the overthrow of the Qing monarchy and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, Chinese women activists pursued the promise of woman suffrage under the new regime until 1913, when suffrage and other progressive democratic reforms were prohibited under the presidency of Yuan Shikai. Woman suffragists in China drew international attention during this period, and in September 1912 leaders of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance toured Nanjing, Shanghai and Beijing and drew large audiences. In Portland, as in San Francisco, the nationalist movement inspired some Chinese American women to become "new women" and to take on reforms for women's rights.⁷² As the Oregon suffrage campaign of 1912 coincided with the struggle for woman suffrage in China, Chinese American women in Portland formed an equal suffrage society with Dr. (Mrs. S.K.) Chan as its president. At the invitation of the CESL, some 150 suffragists, Esther Pohl among them, attended a luncheon for Chinese American suffragist guests on April 11. The event made history, the Oregonian reported, as Chinese American women sat "side by side with their Caucasian sisters." Yet, a racial gulf still separated suffragists, as "white suffragists yesterday learned for the first time of the existence of such an organization [of Chinese American suffragists] in the Chinese quarter."⁷³

White and Chinese American suffragists in Portland publicized and politicized woman suffrage activism in China. In March 1912, when it appeared that China had granted suffrage to women in Nanking, members of the Central Campaign Committee joined other suffragists in sending "felicitations" to Chinese women, congratulating them on the victory. And Esther Pohl and the PWCCC sent a message directly to the Chinese consul of the Northwest, Portland merchant Moy Back Hin, congratulating the new republic and hailing China as a true democracy, "a government of all the people, and not a government of half the people as we have in Oregon."⁷⁴ In her speech at the April suffrage luncheon, Chan underscored the theme of "catching up" with China. With her daughter Bertie interpreting, she said that China had taken a step ahead of the United States and Oregon by granting the ballot to women: "Oregon is bounded by states in which women are on equal terms with the men [Idaho, Washington, and California], China completing the square." She expressed the hope that Oregon would soon "take her place among them."⁷⁵

Women gathered for the Portland Suffrage Luncheon on April 11, 1912. Front row, left to right: Bertie G. Chan, Mrs. Herbert Low, Edna Low, Dr. (Mrs. S.K.) Chan, Ida Tong, Mrs. Ng Tong. Back row: La Reine Helen Baker, Buehlah Tong, Sarah Commerford, and Fannie Chan.

Originally published in the Oregon Journal, April 12, 1912

Esther Pohl shaped her own suffrage activism in the context of these diverse groups and activities, with the strength of her relationship with Anna Howard Shaw, and with a commitment to create coalitions and coordination among the burgeoning woman suffrage ranks. On January 28, 1912, she organized a meeting of suffrage workers at which "plans for the upcoming campaign were informally discussed." She brought together suffrage supporters from varied backgrounds, most of them professional and wage-earning women.⁷⁶ The group organized a twice-monthly votes-for-women forum in the Olds, Wortman & King department store auditorium, each facilitated by a different suffrage society. These forums continued throughout the campaign and became a key venue for suffrage addresses and discussions and a bridge across organizations. On February 10, Pohl organized a Votes for Women Dinner at the Arcadian Garden of the new Multnomah Hotel to "get as many new faces as possible" and plan for future events. Here, again, Pohl worked to build a coalition of suffragists, this time with two teachers, three bookkeepers and stenographers, four women associated with medicine, three women journalists, four wives of Portland lawyers, and her colleague Sarah Evans.⁷⁷ When the PWCCC reported that work had begun "toward organizing the various women in trades, professions, employment, and societies" such as "the business women, sales and office women and those in the professions," the group was apparently highlighting Pohl's efforts at collaboration.⁷⁸

Pohl continued her leadership role on the PWCCC and also had membership in the PESL and the CESL, but in September she announced the organization of a new suffrage organization, Everybody's Equal Suffrage League. It was a symbolic protest against the conflicts among suffrage organizations and the hierarchies within them but also a celebration of the broad coalition of suffrage supporters in Portland and in Oregon and the populist promise of the campaign. At the end of July, Pohl left Portland to marry George Lovejoy, an insurance manager and entrepreneur who had moved to Portland in 1911. On their return, she implemented plans for Everybody's League with the philosophy that the group was "free from all cliques and class distinctions and open to all" and that "members scorn any rules and regulations." A commitment to including wage-earning women was central to Pohl Lovejoy's vision. Working women had told her that subscriptions for other suffrage groups (sometimes at several dollars per month) were out of their reach, but they wanted to participate. Anybody could be a life member of Everybody's League for a subscription of twenty-five cents, and everybody who was a member was automatically a vice president.⁷⁹ According to the Oregon Journal, the "notable thing about the league is its democracy, the membership includes both men and women, young and old, and from the humblest walks of life up to and including United States senators and supreme judges."⁸⁰ Everybody's League principles struck a cord with many Portlanders, and the group enjoyed much favorable press, including news of the subscription of New York suffragist and society leader Alva Belmont. By the close of the campaign, the League had some six hundred members. Pohl Lovejoy and Everybody's League also joined the Central Campaign Committee, something that the PWCCC never did because of conflicts with Duniway and her supporters.⁸¹

Pohl Lovejoy also connected with suffrage groups through her own talks to organizations and by facilitating the visits of national speakers. She was a frequent speaker at the Olds, Wortman & King auditorium forums and became a leader of the Equal Suffrage Lyceum League, whose goal was to bring prominent suffrage speakers to Portland. She spoke at a University of Oregon Alumnae dinner, to the Portland Transportation Club — with "unique invitations in the form of a prescription signed by Dr. Pohl" — to the members of the Grange, and to the Colored Women's Equal Suffrage Association.⁸² With Elizabeth Eggert and Grace Watt Ross, she traveled to Eugene to help organize that city's suffrage league and was principal speaker; and with Sara Bard Field Ehrgott, she addressed the Oregon Irrigation Congress on the importance of women's votes. In her speeches, Pohl Lovejoy voiced some of the common themes of the campaign: Oregon needed to "catch up" with Idaho, Washington, California, and China and grant the vote to its women; woman suffrage was just and equitable; and women needed suffrage to make laws for a better community. She also used experiences from her own life and career, arguing that the vote was important to make workplaces safe, wages fair, and occupations open to women.⁸³

Pohl Lovejoy also stressed that women needed the vote to maintain healthy communities. In a speech to the Oregon Grange in August, for example, she asked if a woman who

is compelled to drink infected water because the city in which she lives empties its sewage into the river at one point and takes its drinking water out of it at another is ... not just as apt to die from Typhoid as the man who approves of the system? If she is too poor to pay the water rate fixed by the city government, the water is promptly turned off though she may have a half dozen thirsty children waiting at the faucet.

Women, she said, should have a voice in "making those laws."⁸⁴

Pohl Lovejoy achieved a strategic victory with the successful campaign visit of NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw in September 1912. When she wrote that summer urging Shaw to come to support the campaign, Shaw replied: "Do you really think it would be to the advantage of Oregon to have me come? ... I am interested in Oregon, would give my last bottom dollar to have it carry ... and I don't care a fig how much I am abused by any person or any Society in the State if I could really feel that it would be helpful to the cause for me to come." By mid-August, Shaw and Lucy Anthony had firmed up plans for an Oregon campaign visit. When the bedridden Abigail Scott Duniway learned of Shaw's impending visit, she "issue[d] an order" for Shaw "not to set foot upon" Oregon soil, saying that she would not receive the NAWSA president until she did it "in Hell." Pohl Lovejoy wrote Shaw with the details, and Shaw replied: "I'm glad you had the sense and spunk to write me that letter. It has decided me to go no matter what...." Of Duniway, she wrote: "Poor old bluffer ... I never intend to take a trip to that country [Hell] and with all her faults I hope she will not."⁸⁵

Members of the Portland Woman's Club Campaign Committee canvass for suffrage in April 1912. Pictured from left to right are committee members Elizabeth Avery Eggert, Grace Watt Ross, and Esther Pohl. Frances Xavier Matthieu, a suffrage supporter, stands in front.

Courtesy OHSU Historical Collections & Archives

Shaw took to the campaign trail in August 1912, visiting states that were currently debating woman suffrage amendments — Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas. Pohl Lovejoy was there to launch the Oregon segment of Shaw's trip at the Pendleton Round-Up on September 27. Shaw spoke from an automobile, "holding the meeting at night on the street in which thousands of horsemen — cowboys, Indians, and ranchmen — were riding up and down, blowing horns, shouting and singing" until they quieted for her address. People cheered, stopped to talk and shake her hand, and threw flowers into the car. Her one regret, she said, was that she had arrived too late to see the cowgirls compete.⁸⁶

Pohl Lovejoy, Shaw, and Lucy Anthony traveled by train to Portland, where ten carloads of supporters greeted them with banners and cheers at the Union Depot. Pohl Lovejoy drove the women to Fifth and Alder and parked by the curb, where Shaw spoke standing from the seat of the car for an hour and a half to a crowd of six hundred people. The Oregonian described her "instant appeal" to the audience, and the Oregon Journal claimed that she held "complete sway over those within the sound of her voice." Shaw's non-stop pace and her enthusiastic reception continued for two more days, with speeches at several locations, a luncheon in her honor at the Hotel Portland with some five hundred guests, an address to the PESL, and a mass meeting at the Multnomah Hotel Ballroom.⁸⁷

Shaw was "delighted with the reception" in Oregon and confident that it signaled a suffrage victory in November. "She based her hopes," the Oregonian reported, "on the hearings accorded her in the streets ... the 'Let 'er Bucks' down at Pendleton had given her hearing after hearing, without an interruption or a jeer." She found the same in Portland, "on the corner of Fifth and Alder just as much as in the ballroom of the Multnomah Hotel." Following the advice she had given Pohl Lovejoy she "spoke feelingly" to Portland's First Congregational Church "of the work done by Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway." She hoped that Duniway might "live until Oregon men have recognized the justice of political equality for women."⁸⁸ From Portland, Shaw traveled to the university campuses at Corvallis and Eugene, to Roseburg, Grants Pass, Ashland, and Medford. Pohl Lovejoy believed that the benefits to the Oregon campaign were incalculable. "The number and enthusiastic spirit of those attending these affairs," she and the PWCCC reported, "has given a marked stimulus to the campaign and been a splendid means of advertising."⁸⁹ In later years, Pohl Lovejoy summed up this portion of the 1912 suffrage victory this way: "Dr. Shaw — Let 'er buck."⁹⁰

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SUFFRAGISTS, Margaret Finnegan points out, "mastered modern means of advertising, publicity, mass production, commercial entertainment ... and publishing" during an era of growing consumer culture to "sell suffrage." Gayle Gullet notes this transformation in the California women's movement, and Rebecca Mead cites these tactics as part of the modern movement for suffrage in western states. Pohl Lovejoy understood that the new suffrage campaign needed mass advertising and public relations. From their headquarters in the Rothchild Building, she and her colleagues in the PWCCC managed an inventory of "Votes for Women" buttons, banners, flags, and leaflets in the yellow suffrage colors — 165,000 pieces of literature and 50,000 buttons in all. PWCCC members dropped green leaflets down on Washington Street and mounted a twelve-foot-high green "Votes for Women" sign on St. Patrick's Day, and sent yellow banners down into the line of march during a Socialist demonstration. Toward the close of the campaign, Pohl Lovejoy headed up a "suffrage flying squadron," with supporters driving through small towns and rural routes tacking up suffrage signs and placing literature in mailboxes and in community centers. With other organizations, she helped to sponsor suffrage slide shows at Portland's motion picture theaters. "One of the notably striking ones shows the states of California, Washington and Idaho with portraits of a man and woman in the center surrounded by the products of the states," the Oregon Journal reported. "The state of Oregon is represented by a lonely, dejected man. The lesson is obvious."⁹¹

Pohl Lovejoy used the Portland Rose Festival in June to promote the cause with the Suffrage Lunch Wagon. Working with Davis of the Men's Club, who was one of the festival organizers, she and Mrs. John Scott led the way as members of the PWCCC prepared and sold sandwiches, doughnuts, ice cream, and sodas on the downtown streets for two hours each day of Rose Festival week. They decorated the "Ballyhoo Wagon," donated by the Speedwell Auto Truck Company with "bunting, festoons of rose and green, votes for women flags, and signs that bring home the Pacific Coast Suffrage slogan: 'Oregon Next.'" Davis rode along as the "spieler" and "attracted crowds and made them buy whether they were hungry or not."⁹² The group invited Hilda Keenan, an actor performing at the Orpheum Theater, to lend her celebrity to the cause. Keenan won spectators' acclaim as she successfully tossed a sandwich to a sailor watching the festivities atop a telephone pole. When the occasional anti-suffragist "hissed" the wagon along the route, suffrage workers rang a dinner bell and smiled, and the crowd responded with "ovations."⁹³ It was all spectacle and street performance by design. The "famous suffrage truck" drew festival-goers and spectators by the hundreds and provided unforgettable entertainment and suffrage publicity through the week.⁹⁴

Through the work of diverse groups, the 1912 Oregon campaign became part of the modern suffrage movement, designed to appeal to a wide range of male voters who were used to mass media and advertising. As one of the PWCCC's first activities, secretary Nan Strandborg established a "bi-weekly suffrage news service," sending press releases to "every newspaper in Oregon." The Oregonian, the Oregon Journal, the Portland Evening Telegram, the worker-oriented Portland News, and the Portland Labor Press all covered suffrage news and events. In October 1912, the Oregon Journal created a regular column entitled "What Suffragists Are Doing," and suffrage organizations advertised heavily in both mainstream and specialized Portland newspapers.⁹⁵ The PESL placed an ad in the Portland News, and the CESL reached out to Italian American men in Portland's La Tribuna Italiana.

Portland suffrage groups used modern strategies and tactics to their fullest. The Central Campaign Committee arranged for a giant "Votes for Women" sign on the left-field fence of the new Portland baseball grounds for the opening game of the Pacific Coast League in April. "Pike" Davis purchased "eight feet of curtain advertising space" on the drop curtain at Portland's Orpheum and Empress theaters, and by the end of the campaign suffrage groups had lantern slide shows in over thirty movie houses in Portland and vicinity.⁹⁶ Suffragists arranged for Portland department stores to advertise suffrage and to have suffrage window displays. Sara Bard Field Ehrgott and C.E.S. Wood spoke on votes for women to an estimated ten thousand people at Oaks Amusement Park in August. "Great banners, pennants, and cartoons were everywhere," the Oregon Journal reported, and workers handed out suffrage buttons and "painted the park yellow."⁹⁷ Through the summer and fall, Emma Wold, Louise Bryant Trullinger, and dozens of other CESL members gave "noon talks" to workers at Portland factories.⁹⁸ The PWCCC sponsored a visit from California suffragist Mary Ringrose and helped her prepare literature to distribute to Catholic churches and schools. The CESL declared September 25 "blotter day" in Portland and distributed "tasteful yellow blotters in every office in town where they will be accepted." In the last days of the campaign, groups placed sandwich boards and held parades, and speakers took to street corners.⁹⁹

Nothing could have been further from Abigail Scott Duniway's "still hunt" philosophy and style. Her illness and inability to control the suffrage groups were critical factors in the way the campaign unfolded. Still, Duniway was delighted to leave her bed in October for her seventy-eighth birthday and a gala celebration with Portland suffragists, including Pohl Lovejoy, a gathering that itself contributed to the mass advertising of the suffrage campaign.¹⁰⁰

For Esther Pohl Lovejoy, the important thing about the suffrage victory in November 1912 was not that the initiative passed with only 52 percent of the vote, a margin of only 4,161. Rather, it was the impressive increase from the 37 percent who supported suffrage in 1910, illustrating the ability of Oregon suffragists to reverse the results of campaigns that had preceded this one. The numbers "demonstrate," she wrote, "that the decision may be reversed in a very short time" with the hard work of a broad coalition of suffrage workers.¹⁰¹ This powerful result, this positive application of the Oregon initiative system, and this impressive victory for equality was due, in her view, to the strength that came from diverse organizations, from suffragists working with "neither head nor tail to the campaign." The efforts were epitomized by Pohl Lovejoy's Everybody's Equal Suffrage League and her efforts at collaborative activism. The victory was also a result of Abigail Scott Duniway's illness, the contest for power that ensued, and the use of modern mass media and advertising. The rich resources that provide the history of this campaign bear out these conclusions. They also suggest the importance of Pohl Lovejoy's relationship with Anna Howard Shaw and the NAWSA and the noteworthy cooperation across racial lines in the suffrage coalition in Portland.

The Oregon suffrage campaign of 1912, with its diverse organizations and coalitions for action, allowed Esther Pohl Lovejoy to develop skills as a fundraiser, organizer, manager, and collaborative worker. She traveled for the cause, solved problems to make programs run smoothly, and learned to work with and sometimes around others to accomplish a goal. She honed her writing and speaking skills and gained confidence in presenting her arguments in public. All of these experiences and skills were a foundation for her subsequent career.

Following the Oregon victory, Pohl Lovejoy practiced medicine, served as the Oregon congressional representative for NAWSA's legislative committee, and received an impressive 44 percent of the vote in her bid for a congressional seat from Oregon's Third District in 1920. As America entered World War I, she went to France with the support of Anna Howard Shaw, then the director of the Woman's Committee for the Council of National Defense in Washington, D.C. With backing from the Medical Women's National Association and other groups, Pohl Lovejoy studied the medical needs of women and children in France and wrote House of the Good Neighbor detailing the negative and violent effects of war on women.¹⁰² She was an organizer and first president of the Medical Women's International Association (1919–1924) and director of the international medical relief organization, the American Women's Hospitals, from 1919 until shortly before her death in 1967, providing support for refugees and people in crisis in the Balkans, Europe, the Soviet Union, Asia, and the United States. She wrote three more books, including the comprehensive history of women in medicine, Women Doctors of the World, published in 1957. After 1920, Pohl Lovejoy lived at a home base in New York City with frequent travel and overseas stays, but she always considered Portland her home and at her death in 1967 was buried in Portland's Lone Fir Cemetery.¹⁰³

Notes

The author extends gratitude to the following people for their support and assistance with this project: Todd Jarvis, Karen Jensen, Amy Khedouri, and Maxine Fraade; Sara Piasecki and Karen Peterson of the OHSU Historical Collections & Archives; the staff of the Hamersly Library, Western Oregon University; archivists and staff of the Oregon Historical Society Research Library; archivists and staff of the University of Oregon Special Collections Library; the microforms staff at the Valley Library, Oregon State University; Layne Sawyer and the staff at the Oregon State Archives; Diana Banning, Portland City Archivist; Judith Margles, Anne LeVant Prahl, and Becky Patchett of the Oregon Jewish Museum; Don Nelson; Ty Thompson and Rod Richards at the Multnomah County Library; Jeanne Deane, Rebecca Mead, Janice Dilg, Michael Helquist, Susan Armitage, and Linda Kerber. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the article in manuscript form and to the thoughtful and dedicated staff at the Oregon Historical Quarterly. The author received a research grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities for this project and gratefully acknowledges this crucial support for the project. This work is part of a larger biographical study of Esther Pohl Lovejoy.

^1. Esther Pohl-Lovejoy, "Oregon's Sudden Conversion," Woman's Progressive Weekly, February 15, 1913, 8–9. Copy in box 7, Accession 2001–011, Esther Pohl Lovejoy Collection, 1849–1994, Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives, Portland, Oregon [hereafter Lovejoy Collection].

^2. Pohl-Lovejoy, "Oregon's Sudden Conversion."

^3. Historians have identified the significance of the 1912 Oregon woman suffrage campaign and its departure from previous struggles in the state but have not conducted extensive research to evaluate its specifics and analyze the implications. G. Thomas Edwards credits the Washington and California victories and the rejection of Duniway's "still hunt" in favor of modern methods and strategies during her illness. Edwards suggests that the small margin of victory in 1912, 52 percent, indicates the likelihood "that many men in 1912 actually voted against the controversial Duniway." Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990), 300–302. Rebecca J. Mead situates the 1912 Oregon campaign in the suffrage movement's adoption of modern tactics and credits Oregon suffragists with using "new inspiration" and "valuable lessons" from Washington and California during Duniway's illness. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 118. Duniway biographer Ruth Barnes Moynihan gives just over two pages to the 1912 campaign but credits Duniway and her followers, the death of Harvey Scott — Duniway's brother and suffrage opponent — and "sentimental publicity" for Duniway during her illness as factors for victory. Moynihan, Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 214–17.

^4. Readers will see clearly my debt to Amy Khedouri and Maxine Fraade, who donated Lovejoy materials to the Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives, Portland, Oregon [hereafter OHSU Archives]. Khedouri was also generous enough to share additional items from the collection of Lovejoy materials in her possession.

^5. Esther C.P. Lovejoy, with an Introduction by Bertha Hallam, "My Medical School, 1890–1894," Oregon Historical Quarterly 75:1 (March 1974): 23. On Seabeck, see Esther Pohl Lovejoy, chap. 1–42 of "Salt Water & Sawdust or Seed From Kent," box 4, folders 23–26, Lovejoy Collection.

^6. Lovejoy, "My Medical School," 19. Just in its fourth year in 1890, the UOMD was in competition with the more established Willamette University Medical Department (founded in Salem in 1867 and relocated to Portland in 1878). See O. Larsell, The Doctor in Oregon: A Medical History (Portland: Bindfords & Mort for the Oregon Historical Society, 1947), 343–76. On medical education, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Kenneth Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine, with a new preface by the author (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Ellen C. More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For a particularly illustrative account of women students' hazing at the Pennsylvania Hospital, see Steven J. Peitzman, A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850–1998 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 33–38.

^7. Fifth Annual Announcement of the Medical Department of the University of Oregon, Session of 1891–92 (Portland: Lewis and Dryden, 1891), 12, OHSU Archives. Esther Clayson, Helena Scammon, and Clara M. Davidson were the three women students. Scammon graduated in 1893 but did not practice, and Davidson attended just the first year.

^8. Eighth Annual Announcement of the Medical Department of the University of Oregon, Session of 1894–1895 (Portland: A. Anderson, 1894), 14, OHSU Archives; Oregonian, April 1, 1894, 9. Marriage License for Dr. Emil Pohl and Dr. Esther Clayson, Married 25 April, 1894, Multnomah County, Oregon, Marriage License Index and Record, December 1885–June 1895, microfilm reel 2, vol. 10, 204, Oregon State Archives, Salem, Oregon. Emil graduated in 1893 but continued on as Demonstrator of Anatomy during the 1893–1894 year. See Seventh Annual Announcement of the Medical Department of the University of Oregon, Session of 1893–1894 (Portland: A Anderson, 1893), 23, OHSU Archives; Eighth Annual Announcement, 4; and Lovejoy, "My Medical School," 34–35.

^9. Portland City Directory and Street Guide 1904 no. 42 (Portland: R.L. Polk, 1904), 287. Subsequent entries in the Directory establish that Annie Clayson lived in the home until her death in 1924, except for an absence in 1911–1912.

^10. Special Meeting, Portland Board of Health, August 11, 1905, 87, City of Portland Board of Health Minutes 1903–1909, City of Portland, Stanley Parr Archives and Records Center, Portland, Oregon [hereafter SPARC]. See also Oregon Journal, August 9, 1905, 1, 6. The other two physicians appointed were A.J. Giesey and George F. Wilson. Both men had been Pohl's professors at the University of Oregon Medical School. Special Meeting, Portland Board of Health, July 11, 1907, 219–20; City of Portland Board of Health Minutes, 1903–1909, SPARC; Oregonian, July 12, 1907, 10; and Oregon Journal, July 11, 1907, 1. On Harry Lane, see Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 29–45. Lane supported woman suffrage and was a speaker at the NAWSA convention at the Lewis and Clark Exhibition discussed below. Pohl's visible role as president of the medical women's club and her role at the convention, outlined below, undoubtedly influenced Lane's nomination of Pohl to the board.

^11. Oregonian, September 12, 1908, 9; Oregon Journal, September 11, 1908, 5; Frederick Clayson Pohl, Certificate of Death, September 11, 1908, Acc. 91A17, box 8, folder 8, Multnomah County Death Certificates, 1908 (9/1–9/11), Oregon State Archives, Salem, Oregon.

^12. Fairbanks News-Miner, May 12, 1911, 3; and Oregon Journal, May 13, 1911, 5.

^13. Marriage Registration 1912–09–022561, George Albert Lovejoy and Esther Clayson Pohl, July 30, 1912, Victoria, British Columbia, Department of Vital Statistics, B.C. Archives Microfilm B11370. See Oregonian, August 9, 1912, 16. Lovejoy was in the insurance business and the two returned to live at Pohl Lovejoy's home at 393 Williams St. in Portland. Decree of Divorce, Esther Pohl Lovejoy vs. George A. Lovejoy, Eighth Judicial District, Baker, Oregon, Circuit Court Journal, November Term, December 10, 1920. See Lancaster Pollard and Lloyd Spencer, A History of the State of Washington (New York: American Historical Society, 1937), 3:42–43; and Seattle Times, March 2, 1944, 22.

^14. For more on this nationwide movement of women and progressive reform, see Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science; and More, Restoring the Balance.

^15. Mae H. Cardwell, M.D., "The Oregon Medical Society — An Historical Sketch," Medical Sentinel 13:7 (July 1905): 194. Dr. Angie L. Ford and Dr. Ella J. Ford were the two first women graduates of Willamette and the first female members of the state society. See Cardwell, "Portland City Medical Society — A Resume," Medical Sentinel 13:7 (July 1905), 213. For comparison of Oregon to other states and regions, see Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 179–180.

^16. In 1905 there were 716 physicians in Oregon and 54 (8 percent) were women. See "Directory of Physicians and Surgeons in the State of Oregon," in Official Register and Directory of Physicians and Surgeons in the State of California: to which is Added a Directory of Physicians and Surgeons of Oregon and Washington and a Directory of the California State Nurses' Association, (San Francisco: Medical Society of the State of California, 1905), 279–307. The directory includes both "regular" and alternative practitioners. See also United States Bureau of the Census, "Vital Statistics and Health and Medical Care," in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 Part I, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975), 76; and Mary Sutton Macy, M.D., "The Field for Women of Today in Medicine," Woman's Medical Journal 27:3 (March 1917): 52.

^17. Mae H. Cardwell, M.D., "The Medical Club of Portland — Historical," Medical Sentinel 13:7 (July 1905): 223–26. The Oregonian reported a membership of seventeen in 1906 including Drs. Mae Cardwell, Mary Parker, Sarah Whiteside, Edna Timms, Gertrude French, Mary MacLachlan, Marie Equi, Sarah Hill, Kitty Plummer Gray, Ethel Gray, Esther Pohl, Elsie Patton, Amelia Ziegler, Jessie McGavin, E.E. Van Alstine, Eugenia Little, and Katherine Manion. See Oregonian, March 4, 1906, 27.

^18. Esther Pohl speech to "Madame President and Ladies," n.d. box 1, folder 8, Lovejoy Collection. See also, for example, Portland Woman's Club Minutes, November 8, 1907, in bound volume "Club 1905–1912," box 1, folder 8, Portland Woman's Club (Or.), Records, 1895–1995, MSS 1084, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon [hereafter Portland Woman's Club Records]; Minutes of Regular Monthly Meeting, Council of Jewish Women, February 5, 1908, 61, 67, Records, Council of Jewish Women, 1906–1915, Oregon Jewish Museum Archives, Portland, Oregon [hereafter Council of Jewish Women Records]. On Pohl's efforts to stop the spread of bubonic plague, which had struck San Francisco and Seattle by early fall 1907, see Esther C. Pohl, Health Commissioner to Honorable Mayor and City Council, September 11, 1907, Portland City Council Documents 1907 (F-I), series 2001–09 box 92, folder 3 "Health," SPARC.

^19. Esther Pohl (Lovejoy?) to Mrs. Medill McCormick, n.d., Suffrage folder, Amy Khedouri Collection, Scottsdale, Arizona [hereafter Khedouri Collection]. See also Kristie Miller, Ruth Hanna McCormick: A Life in Politics, 1880–1944 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

^20. Pohl to McCormick. See also Esther Pohl Lovejoy to Anna Howard Shaw, March 11, 1917, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^21. Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, 1900–1920 (New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1969), 134. NAWSA held its meeting from June 28 to July 5 and the AMA from July 11 to 14. On the meetings and their impact on the suffrage campaign, see "The Portland Session," Journal of the American Medical Association 44:25 (June 24, 1905): 1998; Oregonian, June 27, 1905, 11; Harper, History, 5:117–50 and 6:541; Oregon Journal, July 1, 1905, 6; and Oregonian, July 4, 1905, 11. Pohl's speech is printed in Oregon Journal, July 9, 1905, 15. See also Carl Abbott, The Great Extravaganza: Portland and the Lewis and Clark Exposition, 3^rd ed. (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2004); Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915); Eleanor Flexner's entry for Shaw in Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary vol. 3 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 274–77; and Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

^22. Alice Stone Blackwell, "Oregon Notes," Woman's Journal, May 26, 1906, 81, and June 9, 1906, 89.

^23. See, for example, Duniway, Coe, Cartwright, Evans, and Pohl to Dear Friend, May 16, 1906, on Oregon Equal Suffrage Association letterhead, series B, OSESA Records, 1872–1915, box 3, folder 5, Correspondence & General Records, 1904–1912, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, MSS 432, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon [hereafter Duniway Papers]. See also Oregonian, May 27, 1906, 18; and Esther C. Pohl, M.D. letter to the editor, Oregon Journal, May 4, 1906, 6.

^24. Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, 292, 284–298. Shaw and other national suffrage leaders had come to Oregon in March, after Susan B. Anthony's funeral. See Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds; Oregonian, April 3, 1906, 14, and April 5, 1906, 9; Woman's Journal, June 2, 1906, 88; "Afternoon Session," [May 15, 1906] Medical Sentinel 14:6 (June 1906): 283–84; Oregonian, May 31, 1906, 9; Portland Evening Telegram, June 4, 1906, 1, 8; and Oregon Journal, June 4, 1906, 1, 2.

^25. See Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 102–106; Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds, 262–93; and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, 6:544.

^26. Kate Gordon to Abigail Scott Duniway, April 27, 1907, box 1, Suffrage Correspondence, folder 3, Suffrage Correspondence, 1906–Sept. 9, 1907, Abigail Scott Duniway Collection, 232B, Special Collections and University Archives, Knight Library, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon [hereafter Duniway Collection].

^27. NAWSA had contributed over $18,000 to Oregon in 1906. See Abigail Scott Duniway to The Officers and Delegates of the National Equal Suffrage Convention, Chicago, Ill., February 12, 1907, Duniway, Abigail S., microfilm reel 7 (box 10), National American Woman Suffrage Association, General Correspondence, 1839–1961, Library of Congress. See also Abigail Scott Duniway et al. to the Executive Board of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, April 2, 1907; Anna Howard Shaw to Abigail Scott Duniway, May 10, 1907; Abigail Scott Duniway to "DEAR NATIONAL PRESIDENT" May 27, 1907, with the P.S. that "A copy of this will go to each of your committee"; and Abigail Scott Duniway to Kate Gordon, June 7, 1907, all at box 1, Suffrage Correspondence, folder 3, Suffrage Correspondence, 1906–Sept. 9, 1907. For a discussion of some of this correspondence, see Moynihan, Rebel for Rights, 212–14.

^28. "List of Members in Good Standing Oct 1st 1908," box 3, folder 3 Membership Ledger, 1908–1910, pp. 4–5, 8–9, Duniway Papers. This ledger is disorganized and contains lists of members, sometimes dated. Duniway's personal expenses are interspersed throughout. There appears to be no alphabetical gap in the 1908 list. There is no general reliable 1910 list in the collection. For 1906 estimates, see Oregon Journal, June 13, 1906, 1:13; and, for general information, see History of Woman Suffrage, 6:544. Sara Evans wrote the history of the Oregon campaign that is published in this volume.

^29. Oregon, Office of the Secretary of State, A Pamphlet Containing a Copy of All Measures ... at the General Election to be Held on the Eighth Day of November, 1910, Together with the Arguments Filed (Salem: Oregon State Printer, 1910), 3. See also History of Woman Suffrage, 6:544.

^30. Anna Howard Shaw to Dr. Esther C. Pohl, February 29, 1912, 2, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. It would appear that Pohl Lovejoy was thinking of this phrase when she wrote that the 1912 campaign had neither head nor tail. See C.W. Barzee, letter to the editor, Oregon Journal, April 26, 1912, 8; History of Woman Suffrage, 6:544; Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 107; and Duniway, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in the Pacific States, 2^nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 169–277.

^31. See Oregon Blue Book, "Oregon Election History, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall," http://bluebook.state.or.us/state/elections/elections06.htm (accessed July 25, 2007).

^32. Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, January 10, 1911, and Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, March 8, 1911, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^33. John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 188.

^34. Rebecca Edwards, "Pioneers at the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the West," in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99; and Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

^35. Oregonian, December 21, 1910, 6.

^36. Constitutional Amendments Adopted, and Laws Enacted by the People Upon Initiative Petition and Referendum at the General Election November 8, 1910 Together With the General Laws and Joint Resolutions and Memorials Enacted and Adopted by the Twenty-Sixth Regular Session of the Legislative Assembly, 1911 (Salem: Oregon State Printer, 1911), 518–19; and Journal of the House of the Twenty-sixth Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon, Regular Session, 1911 (Salem: Oregon State Printer, 1911), 452–53. The legislative action was not necessary for the initiative to move forward, but the vote of support was important to the equal suffrage cause.

^37. History of Woman Suffrage, 6:545.

^38. I gathered information on suffrage groups into an "Oregon 1912 Suffrage Database" through a close reading of articles from the Portland Evening Telegram, Oregon Journal, Oregonian, Pacific Grange Bulletin, Portland Labor Press, Portland News, Spectator, and the NAWSA's Woman's Journal. There are 42 members identified and 39 for whom occupations can be determined: banker 1, clergy 1, dentist 2, editor 1, engineer 2, fireman on steamboat 1, lawyer 23, manager 2, postmaster 1, real estate 2, sales 1, trades 2. See also Oregonian, January 4, 1912, 14, and January 13, 1912, 4; Oregon Journal, January 4, 1912, 10; and, for more on Daly and Cridge, Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 99–114, 148, 162–63.

^39. Duniway claimed that "we are inaugurating a movement that I hope will spread throughout the United States — the organization of men, who have a vote, for the systematic work to secure a vote for women, who do not have it." See Oregonian, January 4, 1912, 14. She erroneously claimed that the meeting was the first of its kind in the nation for male supporters of woman suffrage. See Omar E. Garwood, "Tells Why Men Organize for Suffrage," Woman's Journal, April 6, 1912, 109; and History of Woman Suffrage, 6:62, 484–85, 843.

^40. Portland Evening Telegram, June 29, 1912. 1. See also Oregonian, June 30, 1912, 12. For more on Davis, see Montague Colmer, comp. History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon (Portland: Historical Publishing Company, 1910), 120; Oregonian, February 2, 1916, 16, and March 2, 1939, 8; Portland Evening Telegram, March 8, 1922, 4, and May 7, 1929, 20; and Oregon Journal, February 28, 1939, 1.

^41. Portland Evening Telegram, January 12, 1912, 5. See also "Forbes-Robinson on the Pacific Coast," Woman's Journal, January 27, 1912, 25, 27; "Minutes of the Regular Monthly Meeting of the Council of Jewish Women [Portland Section], January 3, 1912," Council of Jewish Women Records; and Steven Lowenstein, The Jews of Oregon: 1850–1950 (Portland: Jewish Historical Society of Oregon, 1987), 42, 44, 138–39; Harvey W. Scott, History of Portland, Oregon (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason, 1890), 511–14; Fred Lockley, History of the Columbia River Valley from The Dalles to the Sea (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1928), 2:68–72; and Oregonian, March 29, 1924, 4.

^42. History of Woman Suffrage, 6:547–48. See also Oregon Journal, January 12, 1912, 10; and Oregonian, January 12, 1912, 11.

^43. See Oregonian, September 22, 1912, 2:18. PESL records sent to NAWSA headquarters in 1914 included 264 names. See "Oregon Suffrage Associations," box 22, Reel 14, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, General Correspondence, 1839–1961, Library of Congress, Microfilm. Oregon Journal, October 26, 1976, "World of Women" Section, 16.

^44. Grace Watt Ross, Dora Espey Wilson, Lucia S. (Mrs. W.H.) Fear, Frances (Mrs. George W.) McMillan, and Nan (Mrs. W.P.) Strandborg joined the group during the campaign. See Regular Meeting of the Portland Woman's Club January 12, 1912, 269, box 1, folder 8, May 1905–October 1912, Portland Woman's Club Records; "Report of the Woman's Club Suffrage Campaign Committee For the Period of Feb 20 to Nov. 5 Inclusive," Scrapbook, 1906–1914, box 13, folder 63, Portland Woman's Club Records; and Portland Evening Telegram, January 13, 1912, 8.

^45. Oregon Journal, January 21, 1912, 5:5. See also Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); and, for background on Evans, Sandra Haarsager, Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 291–95.

^46. Abigail Scott Duniway to Sarah A. Evans, January 29, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. See also Sarah A. Evans to Abigail Scott Duniway, January 30, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. Copy in box 1, folder 4, Suffrage Correspondence, September 16, 1907–October 22, 1912, Duniway Collection.

^47. Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, February 7, 1912, and Anna Shaw to Esther C. Pohl, February 29, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. In her autobiography, Shaw wrote that in 1911 a suffrage supporter who wished to remain anonymous sent her "a large amount" of money "to invest, to draw on, and to use for the Cause as I saw fit." Shaw "used this money in subsequent state campaigns" in Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in the campaigns of 1912 and in Montana and Nevada in 1914. In each case the money paid for a suffrage headquarters, office support, and funds for speakers. Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, 296–97.

^48. See Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 184–86; and Mead, How the Vote Was Won.

^49. Portland Evening Telegram, February 1, 1912, 9, February 3, 1912, 12, and February 6, 1912, 2; and Oregon Journal, February 1, 1912, 9, and February 3, 1912, 5. See also Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 122, 133; Lisa Rubens, "The Patrician Radical: Charlotte Anita Whitney," California History 65:3 (September 1986): 158–226; the entry for Helen Hoy Greeley in "Pioneers in the Law: The First 150 Women," Wisconsin State Bar, www.wisbar.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=History_of_the_Profession&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=21490 (accessed July 25, 2007); Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

^50. Portland Evening Telegram, February 9, 1912, 20, and February 13, 1912, 8; and Oregonian, February 11, 1912, 14. See also "Report of Campaign Committee, Woman's Club," [February 9, 1912], Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. On Sara Bard Field Ehrgott, see Sara Bard Field, Poet and Suffragist, with an introduction by Dorothy Erskine, and an interview conducted by Amerlia R. Fry, 1959–1963 (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1979), available at http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1p3001n1/ (accessed August 8, 2007); and Robert Hamburger, Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 158–94.

^51. Portland Evening Telegram, February 1, 1912, 1. See also Portland Evening Telegram, February 2, 1912, 8, February 6, 1912, 2, and February 21, 1912, 2; and Oregonian, February 10, 1912, 16.

^52. Portland Evening Telegram, January 12, 1912, 5; Oregonian, February 5, 1912, 14.

^53. See Oregon Journal, January 25, 1912, 9, and February 10, 1912, 5 (for Wood talk); Oregonian, February 7, 1912, 13; Portland Evening Telegram, February 12, 1912, 1; and Esther Pohl to Anna Shaw, March 17, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^54. Portland Labor Press, January 18, 1912, 1,4, and January 25, 1912, 1.

^55. Portland Evening Telegram, March 2, 1912, 1, 10. By this time Sara Evans, who called the meeting, had resigned as a member of the NAWSA National Committee representing the OSESA and Duniway had revoked her appointment and sent word to the OSESA Executive Board that Evans no longer represented the OSESA. See Abigail Scott Duniway to Executive Board of the OSESA, February 27, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection; Oregon Journal, March 3, 1912, 5; and Oregonian, March 3, 1912, 2:7.

^56. Duniway, then 77, had an abscess on her foot and was suffering from "la grippe" or influenza. See Portland Evening Telegram, March 11, 1912, 3, March 2, 1912, 10; and Moynihan, Rebel for Rights, 214–15. Because she regularly reported in letters to the editor that she was feeling better and would soon be active, her opponents could not count on her illness to be a continuing factor in the campaign. It appears that diversity in organization was a stronger tactic.

^57. Oregonian, March 9, 1912, 1–2. On Coe, see Official Register, 298; Henry Waldo Coe, M.D., in History of Oregon, ed. Charles Henry Carey (Portland: Pioneer Historical Publishing Company, 1922), 2:34–39; and Portland Evening Telegram, December 13, 1913, 1–2. On Equi, see Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 97–100; and Nancy Krieger, "Queen of the Bolsheviks: The Hidden History of Dr. Marie Equi," Radical America 17:5 (September/October 1983): 55–73.

^58. See Portland Evening Telegram, March 9, 1912, 1–2. At a meeting on March 21 to ratify the appointments there was a "spirited discussion" about Duniway's authority to appoint delegates. See Portland Evening Telegram, March 22, 1912, 9.

^59. Portland Evening Telegram, March 16, 1912, 3. See also Oregon Journal, March 16, 1912, 11; and Oregonian, March 17, 1912, 12.

^60. Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, March 19, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^61. Oregon 1912 Suffrage Database.

^62. See Oregonian, September 6, 1912, 2, and March 20, 1912, 11; Portland Evening Telegram, August 13, 1912, 9; Oregon Journal, August 8, 1912, 10, and March 29, 1912, 3; and "Report of the Woman's Club Suffrage Campaign Committee," Portland Woman's Club Records. For a general history of the Republic see Pauline Meyer, Keep Your Face to the Sunshine: A Lost Chapter in the History of Woman Suffrage (Edwardsville, Ill.: Alcott Press, 1980).

^63. Oregon 1912 Suffrage Database; Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 147–152.

^64. Oregonian, May 15, 1912, 11.

^65. Oregonian, September 17, 1912, 12. See also Oregonian, September 16, 1912, 9, October 11, 1912, 3, and November 2, 1912, 14; and Oregon Journal, October 29, 1912, 13.

^66. Oregonian, September 17, 1912, 12. Redmond indicated that the Colored Women's Council had forty active members and met twice monthly, rotating among Portland's African American churches, with Mrs. Will Allen as president and Mrs. Bonnie Bogle as secretary. The Council joined nine other organizations in 1917 as the Oregon Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. See Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940 (Portland: Georgian Press, 1980), 120; and City of Portland, Bureau of Planning, History of Portland's African American Community (1805–to the Present) (Portland: Portland Bureau of Planning, 1993), 44, 18–21. See also Stephanie Shaw, "Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women," in "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible:" A Reader in Black Women's History, eds., Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995), 433–47; and Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 87–109. On Hattie Redmond, see Oregonian, March 17, 1939, 9.

^67. See Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 97.

^68. On African American discrimination in women's clubs, see McLagan, Peculiar Paradise, 120.

^69. Oregonian, August 2, 1912, 12. The reference is probably to activist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. See Kimberly Mangun, "A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady's Program for Race Relations in Oregon, 1912–1936," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 96:2 (Spring 1995): 69–75; and Quintard Taylor, "Susie Revels Cayton, Beatrice Morrow Cannady, and the Campaign for Social Justice in the Pacific Northwest," in African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000, ed. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 189–204. See also Oregonian, October 11, 1912, 3.

^70. Oregonian, November 2, 1912, 14; and Oregon Journal, November 9, 1912, 4. The Central Campaign Committee coalition signatories included the OSESA, CESL, Men's League, PESL, Portland Equality Club, Stenographers' Equal Suffrage Club, Civic Progress Circles, Milwaukie–Oak Grove Equal Suffrage League, CWESA, and Everybody's Equal Suffrage League.

^71. For more on how nativism and racism affected the radical middle class in Portland, see Louise Michele Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 94–96.

^72. See Louise Edwards, "Women's Suffrage in China: Challenging Scholarly Conventions," Pacific Historical Review 69:4 (November 2000): 617–38; Edwards, "Chinese Women's Campaigns for Suffrage," in Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy, ed. Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, (New York: Routledge Curson, 2004), 59–78; and Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 99–105.

^73. Oregonian, April 12, 1912, 16; and Oregon Journal, April 12, 1912, 6.

^74. "China Receives Congratulations," Woman's Journal, April 6, 1912, 112; Oregonian, March 22, 1912, 5; Portland Evening Telegram, March 26, 1912, 11; and, on Moy Back Hin, Marie Rose Wong, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 176–81.

^75. Oregon Journal, April 12, 1912, 6; and Oregonian, April 12, 1912, 16.

^76. Oregonian, January 29, 1912, 7. Attending were Emma Wold, Grace Watt Ross, Blanche Wrenn, Mrs. H.R. Reynolds, Dr. Mary Thompson, Carrie Johnson, and Frances Gotshall.

^77. Portland Evening Telegram, February 10, 1912, 2; and Oregon Journal, February 11, 1912, 4.

^78. "Report of Campaign Committee, Woman's Club."

^79. Oregonian, October 23, 1912, 20; and Oregonian, October 28, 1912, 1.

^80. Oregon Journal, October 24, 1912, 13.

^81. See History of Woman Suffrage, 6:548; Oregon Journal, November 9, 1912, 4; and Oregonian, October 28, 1912, 1.

^82. Oregon Journal, February 5, 1912, 2. See also Portland Evening Telegram, January 29, 1912, 7, June 19, 1912, 3, and July 25, 1912, 8; and Oregonian, August 18, 1912, 7, and September 16, 1912, 9.

^83. See Eugene Daily Guard, March 29, 1912, 6; Portland Evening Telegram, February 22, 1912, 1, March 30, 1912, 7, and July 25, 1912, 8; Oregon Journal, April 7, 1912, 5:5; and Oregonian, August 18, 1912, 7.

^84. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, "Mr. Chairman, Men and Women of the Oregon Grange," [August 1912], Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^85. Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, June 6, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection. Shaw indicated that she was responding to Pohl's letter of May 12, 1912, but I have not been able to locate a copy of that letter. Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, August 14, 1912, and Anna Shaw to Esther Pohl, August 30, 1912, Suffrage folder, Khedouri Collection.

^86. Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, 300–301; and Oregonian, September 29, 1912, 7. See also Pendleton East Oregonian, September 23, 1912, 1, and September 28, 1912, 2.

^87. Oregonian, September 29, 1912, 16; and Oregon Journal, September 29, 1912, 1, 9. See also Oregon Journal, September 30, 1912, 5; Portland Evening Telegram, September 30, 1912, 3; Oregonian, October 2, 1912, 9; and Portland News, October 2, 1912, 8.

^88. Oregonian, October 3, 1912, 13; Portland Evening Telegram, September 30, 1912, 3. See also Oregonian, September 20, 1912, 9.

^89. "Report of the Woman's Club Suffrage Campaign Committee."

^90. "Handy Note Book" Autobiographical Notes, box 8, Lovejoy Collection.

^91. Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1999), 11; Oregonian, October 20, 1912, 13; and Oregon Journal, October 21, 1912, 11. See also Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 185–86; Mead, How the Vote was Won, 118; Portland Evening Telegram, March 8, 1912, 1, March 13, 1912, 3, and March 16, 1912, 11; "Oregon Women are in Race for Votes," Woman's Journal, April 6, 1912, 106–107; and "Report of the Woman's Club Campaign Committee."

^92. Portland Evening Telegram, June 8, 1912, 2, and June 12, 1912, 10; Oregonian, June 10, 1912, 10; Oregon Journal, June 10, 1912, 9.

^93. Portland Evening Telegram, June 13, 1912, 3; and Oregonian, June 9, 1912, 4:2.

^94. Oregonian, June 13, 1912, 13.

^95. "Report of Woman's Club Suffrage Campaign Committee"; and Oregon Journal, October 26, 1912, 7. For ad example, see Oregonian, November 4, 1912, 7.

^96. Portland Evening Telegram, February 27, 1912, 7; and Oregon Journal, October 21, 1912, 11. See also Oregonian, April 14, 1912, 15.

^97. Oregon Journal, August 12, 1912, 6. See also Oregonian, February 24, 1912, 4.

^98. Oregon Journal, August 8, 1912, 10, and August 13, 1912, 6; and Oregonian, August 16, 1912, 10, September 4, 1912, 9, and September 15, 1912, 2:18. See Mary Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

^99. Oregonian, September 4, 1912, 12; and Oregonian, November 1, 1912, 18. See also Portland News, June 10, 1912, 3; Portland Evening Telegram, June 8, 1912, 23; "Report of the Woman's Club Suffrage Campaign Committee"; and, for Ringrose in California, Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 139.

^100. The Portland press provided extensive coverage of the event. See, for example, Oregonian, October 23, 1912, 1, 14.

^101. Pohl-Lovejoy, "Oregon's Sudden Conversion."

^102. See Kimberly Jensen, "Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., the First World War, and a Feminist Critique of Wartime Violence," in Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp, ed., The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives 1914–1919 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 175–93; and Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva.

^103. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 1933; Lovejoy, Women Physicians and Surgeons, National and International Organizations. Book One: The American Medical Women's Association, The Medical Women's International Association. Book Two: Twenty Years with the American Women's Hospitals. A Review (Livingston, N.Y.: Livingston Press, 1939); and Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1957)

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