Women's Equality Day: Women's Suffrage in Oregon

Today, we celebrate 95 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the right of suffrage to American women. Here in Oregon, women actually won the right to vote eight years earlier in 1912 – after five previous attempts, more than any other state!

The above image is from the voter’s information pamphlet for the general election of 1912. You probably received a similar pamphlet in the mail during the last election, outlining the pros and cons of today’s issues and giving you more information about the candidates. The State of Oregon Law Library has a collection of these voter pamphlets going all the way back to 1902, when Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum process. These pamphlets can help shed some light on public sentiment at the time.

“To call a government a democracy when half the population is barred from participation in governmental affairs is an absurdity,” argues the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association in the 1912 pamphlet’s affirmative argument.

On the other side, the Oregon State Association Opposed to the Extension of the Suffrage to Women argued that “suffrage is to be regarded not as a privilege to be enjoyed, but as a duty to be performed” – a duty that the majority of women didn’t want, notwithstanding the “small minority of the women of the State, who make up in activity what they lack in numbers.” Besides, women’s suffrage had failed on the ballot several times already – hadn’t the voters spoken clearly?

But by 1912, public sentiment was shifting. Washington, California and Idaho had already voted for votes for women. Pro-suffrage activists used grassroots organizing and mass media outreach to make their arguments to voters, and the measure passed by 52 percent.

Learn more about the Oregon women’s suffrage movement at the Oregon Encyclopedia and the Oregon Women’s History Consortium’s Century of Action, or get a national perspective from the National Women’s History Museum. You can also visit us here in Salem to read the 1906, 1908, 1910 and 1912 ballot measures for yourself!