On February 17, Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives John Rusk and President of the Oregon Senate Ben Selling signed Senate Joint Resolution 12:
Be it resolved by the Senate, the House concurring:
That we have carefully considered the Equal Suffrage Amendment, as submitted by initiative petition to the present legal voters of the State, for their adoption or rejection, and can see no reasonable objection to its adoption, and we cordially recommend its ratification at the November election of 1912.
Members of the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association had collected enough signatures through initiative petition by December 1910 to place the measure on the November 5, 1912 ballot. Now by February 17, 1911 with SJR12 the Oregon state legislature lent its support to votes for women in the state.
I'll be blogging about subsequent events in the rich history of this campaign one hundred years ago here, among other Esther Lovejoy materials and Oregon women's history.
FEBRUARY 17, 1911
Friday, February 17, 1911, Morning Session, Oregon House of Representatives
MESSAGE FROM THE SENATE
Salem, February 17, 1911
Mr. Speaker: I am directed by the President to transmit enrolled Senate Joint Resolution No. 12 for your signature.
E.H. Flagg, Chief Clerk
The Speaker [John P. Rusk] announced that he was about to sign Senate Joint Resolution No. 12, and subsequently announced that he had signed the same.
Journal of the House of the Twenty-sixth Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon, Regular Session, 1911 (Salem: Oregon State Printer, 1911), 774.
Friday, February 17, 1911, Afternoon Session, Oregon Senate
The President [Ben Selling] announced that he was about to sign Senate Joint Resolution No. 12…and subsequently that he had signed the same.
Journal of the Senate of the Twenty-sixth Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon, Regular Session 1911 (Salem: Oregon State Printer, 1911), 655.
Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism
Mobilizing Minerva
Women and Transnational Activism
About Me
- Kimberly Jensen
- Kimberly Jensen received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in women’s and U.S. history and teaches history and gender studies at Western Oregon University. She is the author of Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism (University of Washington Press, 2012), Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and coeditor, with Erika Kuhlman, of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2010). She is working on a new book project tentatively titled “Civic Borderlands: Oregon Women’s Claims to Citizenship and Civil Liberties, 1913-1924”