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.