Press Release #3

News Release
For Women's History Month Exhibit and Program, March - May 1998

The University of Oregon Library and the Center for the Study of Women in Society are proud to present "On the Road with Abigail Scott Duniway: Travels and Editorial Correspondence for the 'New Northwest'," a lecture by Jean Ward and Elaine Maveety of Lewis & Clark College.

Jean M. Ward earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon; her dissertation dealt with the novels of Abigail Scott Duniway. She is a Professor of Communication at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR), where she is also Chair of the Communication Department and Director of the Gender Studies Program.

Elaine A. Maveety earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. She is Coordinator of the annual Gender Studies Symposium at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR).

Ward and Maveety co-edited Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925: Lives, Memories and Writings (Oregon State University Press, 1995), and they are currently completing a book on Abigail Scott Duniway's travel and editorial correspondence published in her Portland newspaper, the New Northwest.

Duniway helped shape national women's politics as editor of the New Northwest, the feminist newspaper which drew national attention to women's issues on the Pacific Slope. Through her writings, Duniway campaigned for laws allowing wives to conduct business without their husbands' presence, and she worked tirelessly for statutes allowing married women to keep their own wages, manage their property, and bequeath it to whomever they chose. But she is best remembered for her leadership in the national struggle for suffrage and for her forty years of organizing to secure equal suffrage in Oregon, culminating in a narrow victory in 1912 when Oregon became the seventh state to approve votes for women. Governor Oswald West asked Duniway to write the Woman Suffrage Proclamation, making suffrage for women in Oregon law.

This lecture is presented as part of the Feminist Voices and Visions exhibit in the lobby of Knight Library. "Feminist Voices and Visions" focuses on women's publishing in Oregon. The exhibit is actually two related exhibits in one: one exhibit is about CALYX, a journal of feminist art and literature founded in Oregon in 1976 and published in Corvallis; the other exhibit is about Abigail Scott Duniway, Oregon's tireless campaigner for women's suffrage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A highlight of the Duniway exhibit is the original proclamation written by Duniway, on loan from the Oregon State Archives. The exhibits continue through May 29.

This event is scheduled for Tuesday, May 26 at 3:00 p.m. in the Knight Library's Browsing Room. The lecture and reception following are free, and the public is invited to attend. For more information, please contact Linda Long, 346-1906 or Colleen Bell, 346-1817.