author
Abigail Scott Duniway
1834–1915
A fearless newspaper editor and campaigner, she spent decades pushing for women’s rights in the Pacific Northwest. Her persistence helped make Oregon one of the states that granted women the vote before the Nineteenth Amendment.
1 Audiobook
From the West to the West : Across the plains to Oregon
by Abigail Scott Duniway
About the author
Born in Illinois in 1834, Abigail Scott Duniway traveled west to Oregon Territory with her family as a teenager, an experience she later recorded in a journal and drew on in her writing. She became known as a writer, editor, and public speaker who used both journalism and fiction to argue that women should have greater independence and political power.
Duniway founded and edited The New Northwest, a newspaper that championed women's rights, and she became one of the leading suffrage voices in Oregon and the wider Northwest. Her campaign lasted for decades and was not always popular, but she kept organizing, lecturing, and publishing until Oregon women won the right to vote in 1912.
She is remembered not only as a suffragist but also as a pioneer author who helped shape public debate in the American West. Duniway died in Portland in 1915, just a few years before the Nineteenth Amendment extended voting rights to women across the United States.