Abigail Jane Scott Duniway was an American leader of the woman suffrage movement. Her experience as a business woman in an occupation that brought her into intimate contact with other women brought to her attention the legal inequalities imposed upon her sex and led her to devote her life to the cause of equal rights for women.
Background
Abigail Jane Scott Duniway was born on October 22, 1834 on a farm near Groveland, Tazewell County, Illinois, United States. Her parents, born in Kentucky, were of mixed nationality; the father, John Tucker Scott, Scotch-Irish and English; the mother, Ann Roelofson, German, French, and English. In 1852 the Scott family, father, mother, and ten children, including Abigail and her fourteen-year-old brother, Harvey W. Scott, set out in ox-team wagons for the Oregon country. The mother and a brother died on this long journey. The others arrived at Lafayette, Oregon.
Education
Abigail taught a district school at Lafayette, Oregon, during the winter. After running a boarding-school at Lafayette for three years, she moved her family to Albany where she taught a private school for one year and then launched into trade with a millinery and notions store.
Career
For sixteen years Duniway continued this paper and at the same time was active in lecturing, and organizing societies throughout the Northwest. She endured many bitter personal attacks and even mob violence before securing a hearing for herself and her cause. Through her efforts, however, in 1873 the Oregon Woman Suffrage Association was organized, and county and local associations throughout the state were founded in the years that followed. During these years petitions were presented to each session of the state legislature. In 1882 that body for the second time enacted a resolution submitting to vote of the people a constitutional amendment which should give the vote to women. The amendment was defeated at the election of 1884 but the agitation continued. In 1883 the legislature of Washington Territory passed a measure, drafted by Mrs. Duniway, that gave the vote to women.
From 1887 until 1895 she resided in Idaho, and she won another victory when woman suffrage was adopted there in 1896. She returned to Oregon and revived the movement in that state, but success did not come until the election of 1912, when the suffrage amendment was carried by a vote of 61, 265 to 57, 104- Mrs. Duniway drew up with her own hand the proclamation signed by the governor of Oregon that announced the final triumph of her long years of devotion to a single cause. Two years later she published Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (1914), somewhat inaccurate in details. She had previously published two novels: Captain Gray’s Company: or, Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon (1859), and, nearly half a century later, From the West to the West (1905). In 1876 she published David and Anna Matson, in verse.
Achievements
Duniway helped to organize an “Equal Rights Society” at Albany. She is remembered chiefly for her ultimately successful pursuit in Oregon of the vote for women.
Duniway began married life with Benjamin Charles Duniway on a “backwoods” farm. After nine years of farm life, an accident to her husband threw upon her the support of her family, increased by six children.
