Reading Wednesday: Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions
Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, by Michael Helmquist
Marie Equi was been rocking my world lately: she was a Portland lesbian, doctor, abortionist, suffragist, labor activist, and pacifist, who made all kinds of radical trouble at the beginning of the 20th Century.
I first heard about her on a local women's history tour, in which they told the story of her horsewhipping a man in the Dalles in the 1890s: at the tender age of 21, before she was a doctor, Equi was homesteading in the Dalles with her girlfriend Bessie Holcomb. Bessie was a schoolteacher, and the school superintendent — a local minister and scoundrel who was notorious for running real-estate swindles on people back east — stiffed Bessie a year's wages. So Equi went into town, horsewhip in hand, to call the man out. He fled out the back door, but the very eager crowd helped Equi intercept him and the man got his horsewhipping. Afterwards, the triumphant Equi raffled off the horsewhip to successfully pay her court costs and replace Bessie's lost salary.
Which is a wonderful and colorful story, yes? It's the least of what this woman did.
She became a medical doctor, at a time when it was still fairly rare for women to do that, and joined in the emergency relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was the only woman among the medicos that went down (iirc, the people organizing the relief efforts didn't want her there, but she bulled her way onto the train anyhow), and she ended up organizing the obstetrics ward, and saved the lives of many mothers and babies who would have died without her. She also got involved with the labor movement, traveling throughout Oregon and Washington on a moment's notice to provide emergency medical care to strikers in the aftermath of police violence. She was quite vocal about local strikes, and would try to foil the arrests of labor speakers -- she once made national news for attacking police with an allegedly poisoned hat pin while demanding the release of a pregnant Native woman (identified in the Oregonian articles as Mrs. O'Connor) who had just been arrested. Equi was a fiery speaker in her own right, and did lots of fundraising for strike and bail funds. Once, in her efforts to evade arrest and finish her damn speech, she borrowed linesman's spurs and climbed a telephone pole to give her speech just above the policemen's reach. (The police tried to conscript the fire department to get her down, but the firefighters were union men, and refused to touch her.) Equi got arrested several times over for labor activism, and likewise was arrested with Margaret Sanger for distributing birth control pamphlets. (She apparently had a love affair with Sanger, too, judging from Equi's letters!) However, she never got arrested for providing abortion services to poor women, which was another injustice she was vocal about -- rich women could de facto get abortion on demand, but not poor women.
(1916 arrest ledger bearing the names of Dr. Marie Equi and Margaret Sanger)
Meanwhile, Equi was in and out of the papers for her relationship with Harriet Speckart, a local heiress who was in the middle of an inheritance fight with her family. Speckart's family asserted that Equi's "influence" over Harriet was a major reason that Harriet shouldn't inherit the family money, and that court case dragged on until 1922, before Harriet finally prevailed. During that long court battle, Equi adopted a daughter — an adoption approved by the courts, despite Equi being an unmarried woman and a known lesbian! — and she and Harriet raised the girl together, Harriet taking informal custody of the girl after she and Equi stopped living together some years later. (Harriet doesn't seem to have been comfortable with Equi's radicalism — at one point Harriet negotiated Equi's release from jail if Equi agreed to leave the state quietly. Unfortunately, no one told Equi about the deal until they were at Union Station. Equi refused to get on the train and marched straight back to jail.)
Predictably, Equi was in the bad books of lumber interests and the FBI, and she vigorously fought back. And not just on her own behalf — there's a story about an activist for Irish independence coming to Equi for help when she was in Portland: federal agents had taken the two hotel rooms that flanked hers and were bugging her room. Equi went to the woman's hotel room, fired shots through the walls into the federal agents' rooms, ripped out the dictaphone, threw it through the transom of one of the feds' rooms, and called in anonymous tips that the agents were consorting with prostitutes in the hotel. Then Equi took the activist home to stay with her instead.
Equi was an outspoken pacifist during WWI, believing the war was imperialist and capitalist and fought on the backs of the poor. Unfortunately, a number of wartime Acts of Congress made it illegal to speak out against the war, and Equi was targeted in a sting operation and charged with sedition. The prosecution actively harassed her and her legal team, planting an undercover operative to get close to Equi and learn her defense strategies. Equi's legal team was able to delay the trial until after the end of the war, but that didn't save her: she still ended up doing time in San Quentin for sedition.
Things weren't the same after that: Equi's health had been damaged by her year in prison, and the Wobblies by that point were on the defensive, fighting for their lives, all their efforts going into fighting anti-syndicalism court cases. After the government crackdown on the socialists, the only radical game in town anymore was the communists, and Equi didn't hold with the communists. So Equi raised her daughter — Speckart had died, so Equi had custody again — raised legal funds for Wobblies, spoke on prison reform, gave shelter to other former activists, and provided down-low abortion services to poor women.
When she died in 1952, she had outlived basically everyone who remembered her sedition trial or her firebrand decades, and all her personal papers were thrown out; the private papers we still have mostly come from the Hoover administration of the FBI, who intercepted and copied all her correspondence for years. While Equi's and Speckart's respective obituaries spoke of them as single women, their daughter knew better: Harriet and Marie are interred together at the Portland Mausoleum, just down the way from me; I'm going to make time to go visit their niches soon.
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Marie Equi was been rocking my world lately: she was a Portland lesbian, doctor, abortionist, suffragist, labor activist, and pacifist, who made all kinds of radical trouble at the beginning of the 20th Century.
I first heard about her on a local women's history tour, in which they told the story of her horsewhipping a man in the Dalles in the 1890s: at the tender age of 21, before she was a doctor, Equi was homesteading in the Dalles with her girlfriend Bessie Holcomb. Bessie was a schoolteacher, and the school superintendent — a local minister and scoundrel who was notorious for running real-estate swindles on people back east — stiffed Bessie a year's wages. So Equi went into town, horsewhip in hand, to call the man out. He fled out the back door, but the very eager crowd helped Equi intercept him and the man got his horsewhipping. Afterwards, the triumphant Equi raffled off the horsewhip to successfully pay her court costs and replace Bessie's lost salary.
Which is a wonderful and colorful story, yes? It's the least of what this woman did.
She became a medical doctor, at a time when it was still fairly rare for women to do that, and joined in the emergency relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was the only woman among the medicos that went down (iirc, the people organizing the relief efforts didn't want her there, but she bulled her way onto the train anyhow), and she ended up organizing the obstetrics ward, and saved the lives of many mothers and babies who would have died without her. She also got involved with the labor movement, traveling throughout Oregon and Washington on a moment's notice to provide emergency medical care to strikers in the aftermath of police violence. She was quite vocal about local strikes, and would try to foil the arrests of labor speakers -- she once made national news for attacking police with an allegedly poisoned hat pin while demanding the release of a pregnant Native woman (identified in the Oregonian articles as Mrs. O'Connor) who had just been arrested. Equi was a fiery speaker in her own right, and did lots of fundraising for strike and bail funds. Once, in her efforts to evade arrest and finish her damn speech, she borrowed linesman's spurs and climbed a telephone pole to give her speech just above the policemen's reach. (The police tried to conscript the fire department to get her down, but the firefighters were union men, and refused to touch her.) Equi got arrested several times over for labor activism, and likewise was arrested with Margaret Sanger for distributing birth control pamphlets. (She apparently had a love affair with Sanger, too, judging from Equi's letters!) However, she never got arrested for providing abortion services to poor women, which was another injustice she was vocal about -- rich women could de facto get abortion on demand, but not poor women.
(1916 arrest ledger bearing the names of Dr. Marie Equi and Margaret Sanger)
Meanwhile, Equi was in and out of the papers for her relationship with Harriet Speckart, a local heiress who was in the middle of an inheritance fight with her family. Speckart's family asserted that Equi's "influence" over Harriet was a major reason that Harriet shouldn't inherit the family money, and that court case dragged on until 1922, before Harriet finally prevailed. During that long court battle, Equi adopted a daughter — an adoption approved by the courts, despite Equi being an unmarried woman and a known lesbian! — and she and Harriet raised the girl together, Harriet taking informal custody of the girl after she and Equi stopped living together some years later. (Harriet doesn't seem to have been comfortable with Equi's radicalism — at one point Harriet negotiated Equi's release from jail if Equi agreed to leave the state quietly. Unfortunately, no one told Equi about the deal until they were at Union Station. Equi refused to get on the train and marched straight back to jail.)
Predictably, Equi was in the bad books of lumber interests and the FBI, and she vigorously fought back. And not just on her own behalf — there's a story about an activist for Irish independence coming to Equi for help when she was in Portland: federal agents had taken the two hotel rooms that flanked hers and were bugging her room. Equi went to the woman's hotel room, fired shots through the walls into the federal agents' rooms, ripped out the dictaphone, threw it through the transom of one of the feds' rooms, and called in anonymous tips that the agents were consorting with prostitutes in the hotel. Then Equi took the activist home to stay with her instead.
Equi was an outspoken pacifist during WWI, believing the war was imperialist and capitalist and fought on the backs of the poor. Unfortunately, a number of wartime Acts of Congress made it illegal to speak out against the war, and Equi was targeted in a sting operation and charged with sedition. The prosecution actively harassed her and her legal team, planting an undercover operative to get close to Equi and learn her defense strategies. Equi's legal team was able to delay the trial until after the end of the war, but that didn't save her: she still ended up doing time in San Quentin for sedition.
Things weren't the same after that: Equi's health had been damaged by her year in prison, and the Wobblies by that point were on the defensive, fighting for their lives, all their efforts going into fighting anti-syndicalism court cases. After the government crackdown on the socialists, the only radical game in town anymore was the communists, and Equi didn't hold with the communists. So Equi raised her daughter — Speckart had died, so Equi had custody again — raised legal funds for Wobblies, spoke on prison reform, gave shelter to other former activists, and provided down-low abortion services to poor women.
When she died in 1952, she had outlived basically everyone who remembered her sedition trial or her firebrand decades, and all her personal papers were thrown out; the private papers we still have mostly come from the Hoover administration of the FBI, who intercepted and copied all her correspondence for years. While Equi's and Speckart's respective obituaries spoke of them as single women, their daughter knew better: Harriet and Marie are interred together at the Portland Mausoleum, just down the way from me; I'm going to make time to go visit their niches soon.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are