OHSU Golden Circle Alumni

On Saturday, May 9 I was honored to present a talk on Esther Lovejoy to the OHSU Golden Circle Alumni. Members received their M.D.s from the University of Oregon Medical School (now OHSU) in 1959 or earlier -- a fifty year group. Esther Lovejoy, their colleague, is what we might term a member of the Centennial Circle Alumni. She graduated 115 years ago last month in April 1894, the second woman to graduate from UOM and the first woman to practice. She would have graduated in 1893 but had to take off a year to work in a department store to make enough money to finish school.

I was pleased to meet a retired physician who was the recipient of one of the Lovejoy scholarships. Esther Lovejoy established the scholarship in memory of her son Freddie who died in 1908 and her first husband Emil who died in 1911. Because she had had to take off a year to work to pay for her own education, and because at the time of her graduation with honors women were not considered for internships, she endowed the scholarship to assist medical students with the costs of education and she stipulated that 1/3 of the scholarships go to women students.

Thank you Golden Circle Alumni for your warm reception and your interesting questions about Esther Lovejoy.

Oregon Women Physicians: Changing the Face of Medicine

On May 6 students, faculty and invited guests attended a reception for Oregon Women Physicians: Changing the Face of Medicine an exhibit at the Hamersly Library, Western Oregon University installed through June 15, 2009. Pictured are Kimberly Jensen, student Caitlin Summers, and physicians Nancy Boutin, Marge Thompson, and Beverly Olsen.

In spring term 2008 WOU students interviewed local women physicians as part of their coursework for History 465: Health, Medicine, and Gender in Historical Perspective with Professor Kimberly Jensen. Materials from these interviews were part of the Portland, Oregon installation of the National Library of Medicine’s traveling exhibit “Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians” last summer at the Multnomah Public Library in association with the Oregon Health & Science University and the Multnomah County Public Library. The online portion of the exhibit may be found at: www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/

For context and perspective students read Regina Morantz-Sanchez’s study Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). They established a set of common questions for the interviews, including information about educational experiences, mentors, challenges, the evolution of careers over time, and how each woman made a difference. Sue Payton of the Technology Resource Center provided training and technical support. Students met with the women physicians in their offices and other locations to conduct interviews that averaged about an hour. The audio files of these interviews are housed at the Hamersly Library Archives. Students selected highlights from these interviews for their course portfolios and portions of those highlights are part of this exhibit.

We express our gratitude to the nine women physicians who agreed to share their stories and perspectives with us. Thank you for your generosity Doctors Melissa Beal, Nancy Boutin, Linda Cunningham, Cynthia Harper, Susan Laing, Lauren McNaughton, Jane Mossberg, Beverly Olsen and Marge Thompson.

Early Oregon Women in Elected Office

While researching Esther Pohl Lovejoy’s run for U.S. Congress from Oregon in 1920 I’ve been learning more about the context of Oregon women and office holding. A recent query by a colleague about early U.S. women in elective office also raised questions about that history. Oregon’s experience illustrates the precarious nature of women’s right to elective office before full suffrage and the creative way that one woman candidate and her supporters dealt with roadblocks.

Oregon women who were twenty-one and taxpaying residents achieved the right to vote in school board elections in 1878. In 1893 the Oregon legislature passed a law providing that women who were twenty-one and citizens of the United States and of Oregon were eligible to run for all educational offices. In the next two years seven women gained election to the office of county school superintendent, among them Nellie Stevens of La Grande, Union County. Stevens ran as the Populist candidate in Union County against longtime Republican incumbent J. L. Carter. When she won the June 1893 election Carter refused to give up his office. Stevens appealed her case and the local court ordered him to deliver the materials of the office to her that November. Carter complied but brought suit against Stevens and the case went to the Oregon Supreme Court. Carter challenged the legality of the 1893 law given that the state constitution required office holders at the county level to be electors and defined an elector as a male citizen. The Oregon Supreme Court in State Ex Rel. v. Stevens (1896) agreed and declared the 1893 law unconstitutional. But at least some members did so with apparent regret. “Whatever views we may entertain as to the propriety of the constitutional provisions prohibiting women from holding county offices, we have no alternative but to declare . . . they are ineligible to the office in question,” they wrote. Nellie Stevens returned to teaching and held positions around Oregon, including fourteen years as principal of the Sitton elementary school in Portland, until her death in 1928.

After the Stevens case it appeared that until women achieved the vote in Oregon they could not hold elective office. But in Astoria, Emma Warren and her supporters engaged in creative civil disobedience to challenge this premise. In 1905 the Clatsop County court appointed Warren as county superintendent of schools to fill a vacancy. Opponents challenged the legality of her appointment based on the Stevens decision. But many community members wanted Warren and they engaged in resistance so that Warren served through her first term. Then supporters devised a plan for her second term. A young man ran for the office in 1908 and by prearrangement resigned after his successful election. The court reappointed Warren and she served until 1912, when women in Oregon achieved full voting rights and the right to elective office once again.

See:

Oregon General Laws 1878, 68

State of Oregon, General and Special Laws and Joint Resolutions and Memorials Passed and Adopted by the Seventeenth Regular Session, 1893 (Salem: State Printer, 1893), 62, Senate Bill 78.

Stevens v. Carter, 27 Or., July 1895, 553-63

State Ex Rel. v. Stevens 29 Or. May, 1896, 464-474.

“Teacher Dies at Phone,” Oregonian, July 22, 1928, 8

“Emma C. Warren,” in Centennial History of Oregon, 1811-1912, ed. Joseph Gaston (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1912), 963.

Do you have information about either of these women? Please post it here.