Clara Bewick Colby and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Campaign of 1905–1906

Abstract

Clara Bewick Colby arrived in Oregon in 1904 and became a key figure and among one of Oregon's primary fieldworkers during the state's 1905 to 1906 woman suffrage campaign. In this research article, Kristin Mapel Bloomberg analyzes Colby's detailed campaign fieldwork records to reveal how “activists conducted their work, building on prior movement strategies by systematizing a professional class of suffrage workers into a centrally organized campaign.” Colby spent her early years as a footsoldier of the movement in Beatrice, Nebraska, where she “wielded her political acumen on the speaker's platform and as publisher of the influential The Woman's Tribune (1883–1909), the second-longest-running woman's rights journal in the United States.” By the time she arrived in Oregon in 1904, she had “ascended to and fallen from the heights of suffrage influence,” but as Bloomberg describes, Oregon held promise and Colby worked tirelessly to collect signatures to put a state constitutional change on the ballot. While the 1905–1906 campaign was imperfect and ultimately failed, it helped establish strategies that would be used successfully in future campaigns.