While publishing the New Northwest newspaper in Portland in 1871, Duniway began a long, forty-two-year campaign for women’s suffrage. She soon established equal suffrage associations and began speaking throughout the Northwest. During this period, she came to be recognized as the principal suffrage leader in Oregon and the Northwest.

Women’s suffrage was placed on the Oregon ballot six times: in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, 1910, and 1912. During the early campaigns, Duniway used the strategy she called the “still hunt:” cautiously lobbying sympathetic and influential men during the early phase of a campaign. Then, once women’s suffrage was placed on the ballot, she would follow up with quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiating. This was an effective early strategy that culminated in the narrow miss of the 1900 campaign. Women’s suffrage would not pass in Oregon until 1912.

Duniway believed women’s suffrage would have passed in 1900 were it not for her prominent brother Harvey Scott’s opposition as editor of the Portland Oregonian. During the 1900 campaign, Scott wrote numerous anti-suffrage editorials that heavily influenced voters, particularly in Portland and Multnomah County. Shy by just 2,137 votes, the 1900 campaign ought to have been a satisfying victory for Duniway. Instead, the defeat was bitter and crushing.

Duniway’s work in the latter campaigns was eclipsed by the efforts of a younger generation of suffragists who brought in modern tactics and techniques, particularly during the successful 1912 campaign. By then, the relatively new Oregon System of Initiative and Referendum, whereby voters, through an established process, could submit ballot measures rather than have legislators submit them, rendered Duniway’s “still hunt” techniques useless. By November 1912, Duniway was seventy-eight years old, quite infirm, and sometimes bedridden.

Often irascible, sometimes cantankerous, but always determined, she had much to live for and survived to vote in Oregon; and she had the honor to write the Oregon Woman’s Suffrage Proclamation on November 30, 1912. For more information about Duniway, please see this virtual exhibit: https://expo.uoregon.edu/spotlight/feminist-voices-visions/feature/abigail-scott-duniway