Mrs. Duniway carried on her newspaper work and her lecturing despite her duties as a housewife whose husband was in poor health, and she reared a family of one daughter and five sons, all of whom were very successful, in law, journalism, and education.
One of her sons, Willis S., was a state printer of Oregon. Another, Wilkie C, was foreman of the Portland Evening Telegram, editor of the Weekly Oregonian, and continued active as a contributor to various publications until his death in 1927. Dr. Clyde Augustus Duniway, the youngest son, retired recently as professor of history at Carlton College, after spending 15 years of his life as president of four higher educational institutions.
Mrs. Duniway, whose active and fearless public work brought her the title of "mother of equal suffrage in Oregon" and "Oregon's grand old woman," devoted 15 years of her life to publication of the New Northwest, displaying energy and intelligence equalled by few publishers of her day.
The papers, in Oregon as elsewhere, reflected the scant sympathy given the battle for women's rights in the 70's. The Eugene Guard was among the most extreme, personal, and picturesque, in its opposition to the movement for votes for women. Note some examples:
A Specimen.—A specimen of how intelligently woman will exercise her "right" to vote is shown in the recent election in New York. The one woman who was allowed to vote cast her ballot for Boss Tweed and corruption. Which is why we remark that woman has no more use for the ballot than the editress of the . . . [the deletion is ours] has for her prodigious ears.
This little editorial gave voice to the generally implied attitude of anti-suffragists that before being accorded the ballot, women should prove to men's satisfaction that the women could vote more intelligently than the men had been doing.
The New Northwest editors (with Abigail Scott Duniway absent so much of the time putting woman suffrage across, her husband and sons cooperated in getting out the paper and it is difficult to be sure of the real authorship of editorials) understood the "Oregon style" pretty well and could take good care of themselves in controversy. The following item from the Oregon Statesman in 1875 gave them a chance:
The Dallas Itemizer comes to us with eight pages, six of them printed in Chicago, however.
The New Northwest's comment was this little dig:
Were the remaining two pages printed in Chicago, the paper would be much more interesting to the general reader, and quite as useful to the citizens of Polk county.
