Abigail Scott Duniway

Abigail Scott Duniway was an American journalist, novelist and women’s suffrage campaigner who became one of the leading advocates for equal voting rights in the Pacific Northwest. Born in Illinois in 1834, she crossed the Oregon Trail with her family in 1852 and later supported her own family through teaching, millinery, writing and publishing.

In 1871 Duniway founded The New Northwest , a Portland newspaper that she used to campaign for women’s legal and political rights. She lectured and organised for suffrage for more than four decades, lived to see Oregon voters approve women’s suffrage in 1912, and was asked by Governor Oswald West to write the state’s Woman Suffrage Proclamation.

Jane Kirkpatrick’s Something Worth Doing makes Abigail Scott Duniway its central character. The novel follows her from marriage and financial hardship in Oregon Territory into teaching, business, newspaper publishing and the long campaign for women’s suffrage, while also examining the strain that public reform placed on her marriage, children and relationships with other activists.