Although Oregon women gained the right to vote in 1912, full citizenship was slow to come. In 1915, three years after women had the vote, only two women were elected to the Oregon legislature. Although there were two spikes, with ten women in the Assembly in 1959 and again in 1963, the years up to the late 1960s are sprinkled with only a few women serving at any time. In 1967, just after the founding of the National Organization for Women, only five women were members of the Oregon Legislative Assembly.

In an effort to address this inequity, women in Oregon began to organize politically in tandem with the developing national Women’s Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The highly effective Oregon Women’s Political Caucus (OWPC) was founded in 1971 by Gretchen Kafoury and others. This same year the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) was established by several influential women, including Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan, who were working for gender equality at a national level. Like the NWPC, the OWPC focused on teaching women the skills to run successful political campaigns.

The effort to bring women and women’s issues into the political arena quickly gained traction. By 1973, eleven women were serving in the Legislative Assembly; in 2001, twenty-nine women were elected, an impressive increase of 414 percent since 1971.