Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/63

Rh Another and later case was that of a woman in another county, whom I had long supplied with millinery and notions, on sixty days' credit, to support a little shop, in which she managed to earn an honorable livelihood for her growing family. Her husband, a well meaning but irresponsible fellow, noted chiefly for poverty and children, was only one of the "unlucky" heads of families everybody knows, whose wife must make the living—if there is any. One springtime, after I had concluded that this man's faithful and thrifty spouse had become sufficiently established to warrant the risk, I sold her a fine stock of millinery on credit. Her business opened with unusual promise, when, one day a stranger to her, who held a judgment against her husband on an old note and mortgage (given prior to their marriage without her knowledge and renewed annually), came into the town, employed an attorney, attached her stock and closed her business. That was more than forty years ago, and I still hold the woman's note for that stock of millinery.

Prior to the year 1872 there was no married woman in all the great domain of the Pacific northwest (except the comparatively few who held claims under the brief existence of the donation land law) who possessed a right, after marriage, even to the bridal trousseau her father had given her as a dot. As the laws recognized the husband and wife as "one," and the husband was that "one," the wife was legally "dead," and was supposed, as a matter of course, to have no further need for clothes.

For the foregoing reasons and many others for which the limits of this chapter have no space, I was at last aroused to the necessity of demanding the ballot for woman; and, although at this writing the final victory remains to be won, so many concessions have been made, all trending in one direction, toward the objective goal, that it would be indeed an obtuse man or woman who would doubt our ultimate and complete success.

The first law enacted by the Oregon state legislature recognizing the legal existence of married women called "The Married Woman's Sole Trader's Bill," was passed in the year 1872. This law enabled women needing its provisions to register themselves as "sole traders" in the office of their county clerk, thus protecting their personal earnings, outside of the mutual living expenses of the family, from dissipation by the husband's creditors.

A law enabling women to vote for school trustees and for funds and appropriations for public school purposes, "if they have property in the district on which they or their husbands pay a tax," was enacted in 1878. They were also empowered to fill the offices of state and county superintendents of schools, but the law was contested in 1896 by a defeated candidate and declared unconstitutional by the supreme court.

Public sentiment now encourages the employment of women as court stenographers, as clerks in both houses of the legislature, on legislative committees and in various other subordinate offices. They may serve as notaries public, and no profession or occupation is legally forbidden to them. All the large non-sectarian institutions of learning are open alike to both sexes.

If either the husband or wife die intestate and there are no descendants living, all of the real and personal property goes to the survivor. If there are children living, the widow receives one-half of the husband's real estate and one-half of his personal property; but the widower takes a life interest in all of the wife's real estate, whether there are children or not, and all of the personal property absolutely, if there are no living descendants—half if there be any. All laws have been repealed which recognize civil disabilities against the wife which are not recognized against the husband except the fundamental right of voting and helping to make the laws which she is taxed to maintain, and to which, equally with man, she is held amenable.

Of the growth of public sentiment regarding the ultimate extension of this right to women, it is significant to note that when a constitutional amendment to enfranchise woman was taken in 1884, the vote was, ayes, 11,223; noes, 28,-