March is Women’s History Month. As we reflect on its meaning and purpose, we honor the women who have worked the land, cared for children and the elderly, and participated in the workplace while struggling with family commitments and the lack of equal compensation.
In the West, land is king. Women have proven their grit by forging homes alongside their husbands, fathers, and sons long before they had the chance to reap the personal and financial benefits of that bargain. Until relatively recently, women could not hold title to their own property.
The
1850 Donation Land Claim Act was an imperfect victory for women’s personal and financial independence in Oregon. The act allowed married women (at the time, only “white settlers” and “American half-breed Indians” – non-U.S. citizens, including Native peoples, Blacks, and Hawaiians, were excluded) to claim land in their own names. Innovative for its time, the act also exempted married women’s property from attachment by their husbands’ creditors.
The 1850 act was just the first step in the
evolution of women’s rights in Oregon. Women’s suffrage organizations began forming in 1870, and the women’s rights movement was well underway in Oregon by the turn of the 20th century.
In 1878, all Oregon taxpayers were allowed to vote in school elections. That same year, the Married Women’s Property Act opened the way for married women in Oregon to own property and enter business arrangements without their husband.
There were six votes on women’s suffrage in Oregon from 1884 to its final victory in 1912. It was a hard-fought battle, and continues to be a struggle as double-standards and deeply held biases die hard. Women’s rights cut across the multidimensionality of women, and women of color – Blacks, Natives, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and others – did not have their rights recognized in the same manner as white Americans.
Nevertheless, victories in women’s suffrage opened new pathways to social justice. In 1921, the Federal Indian Citizenship Act made U.S. citizenship possible for all Native women. Post World War II saw the further inclusion of women in politics and education in Oregon, as women began to move more freely in society.
Through landownership, women could have a voice in politics and compete for their ideas to be heard in the same space as men.
In the mid-1970s there was great interest among women in the
lesbian feminist movement in having access to rural land to be able to live outside of mainstream patriarchal culture. The feminist spirituality movement was also emerging at that time, epitomized by Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove‘s WomanSpirit magazine, which grew to have worldwide distribution. By the early 1980s, eight separatist collectives flourished in southern Oregon, including the Oregon Women’s Land Trust.
Founded in 1975, the trust is a 501(c)(3) membership organization that holds land for conservation and educational purposes in Oregon. The trust owns 147 acres of land in Douglas County, referred to as OWL Farm, and its mission states the trust “is committed to ecologically sound preservation of land, and provides access to land and land wisdom for women.”
The trust came to realize the power that comes with owning title to the land when it thwarted the proposed
Jordan Cove Pipeline in 2021. For a decade and a half, the trust fought Pembina, a multinational energy company, to prevent the company from using eminent domain to build a half-mile section of the pipeline on OWL Farm. Eventually, Pembina surrendered its claim to eminent domain and announced it had no intention of pursuing the project.
Today, there are many Oregon agricultural associations for women landowners. Groups such as the
Black Oregon Land Trust, Oregon Women for Agriculture, and the North Willamette Women Farmer Network help women farmers and forest conservationists protect and heal the Earth.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s remember the oft-mangled quote that appears on T-shirts and house décor: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
In Oregon, that could not be more true.