Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacifi Coast States.
A Duniway Family Copy,
Inscribed By The Author
Duniway, Abigail Scott. Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States. [Portland, Oregon: Published by the Author, 1914.]
8vo.; photographic frontispiece; other photographs throughout; preliminaries lightly worn, darkened; yellow cloth, stamped in black; covers lightly soiled, worn.
First edition of Duniway’s privately printed autobiography. A Duniway family copy, inscribed on the half-title by Duniway to her cousin: "To Julia Hall wife of Albert Donald Hall," in Abigail Scott Duniway’s hand.
After launching her career with a legendary memoir of female pioneer life (Captain Gray’s Company, 1859), Duniway focused her energies and writings on attainment of equal rights for American women. In 1870 she formed the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association, attending sessions of the state legislature, presenting petitions, and speaking on behalf of woman’s suffrage and married women’s property rights on behalf of the Association. In 1871 she founded the Portland suffragist paper The New Northwest, to which she contributed editorials and stories; though critics predicted a hasty demise, the paper spread the doctrines of feminism for nearly two decades. Later in 1871, Duniway accompanied Susan B. Anthony on a lecture tour of the Pacific Northwest, where they rallied against sex discrimination, gaining many converts along the way. Duniway’s passionate and regionally-sensitive speeches in particular were credited with mobilizing popular support for suffrage victories in Washington in 1883, in Idaho in 1896, and in Oregon in 1912.
Duniway would eventually distance herself from Anthony and the National Woman Suffrage Association over the issue of temperance. Anthony, like so many of her feminist contemporaries, came to political age within the temperance movement; she and her peers linked women’s widespread degradation at the hands of out-of-control men to the evils of alcohol, which was also said to account in large part for the so-called “white slavery” movement and other misogynist atrocities. In Duniway’s view, a political connection between temperance and suffrage only served to alienate potential male supporters of suffrage and did nothing to advance the rights of women per s.:
...It ought to be universally manifest that all men should not be denied the power of self-control over human appetites because some men abuse them...The only rational cure for the woes of the drunkard’s wife is the power to protect herself from the condition of servitude without wages in the home, of which she is now a defenseless victim. (Introduction, xiii-iv)
Duniway was, on this as on so many points, quite forward-thinking: American feminists would not abandon the anti-vice campaign till long after prohibition (and indeed, some renegades stand by it to this day).
In Path Breaking, Duniway equates her life story with the story of her work for woman’s suffrage. She devotes only two brief chapters to her childhood—the remaining 24 chapters deal specifically with the slow but steady progress of the women’s rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest. The narrative culminates in what was surely the high point of her political life: in 1912, Oregon’s suffrage measure, authored by Duniway, was voted into law; Duniway, then 77 years old, signed it, becoming Oregon’s first registered woman voter in the process.
Julia Hall, the recipient of this presentation copy, was Abigail Duniway’s cousin. In addition, various clippings are loosely inserted into this volume, including some articles carefully extracted from local Oregon papers discussing Duniway’s legacy; there is also a brief handwritten explanation of provenance by Julia Hall’s daughter which reads in part: “Abigail Scott Duniway was my father’s (Albert Donald Hall) cousin and a dear friend of my mother. She visited us on the farm many times when I was a little girl. Alma H
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