Marie Equi

Cool woman of history, installment one

Many of you know I’ve been working on a novel this year that is partly set in radical circles in the Pacific Northwest in the turn of the last century. (Anarchist pioneers, anyone?) One of the things I love about writing fiction is that I get to research cool things. Just for the heck of it, or the intellectual curiosity of it, or the nerdiness of it, or — ahem — because it might maybe possibly be Important to the Story. In any case, my inner nerd gets very happy. Research topics this summer included the Weather Underground, underground abortion networks, the LA Times bombing of 1910, child labor in Massachusett’s textile industry, and a skinny dipping court case. Somewhere in there, I ran across the life of a woman named Marie Equi and went down a big rabbithole.

Things I learned about Marie Equi on the internet:

Born in 1872, she was one of eleven children in an Italian/Irish immigrant family in New Bedford and had to drop out of high school to work in the textile mills.

She moved to Oregon in her late teens with her girlfriend, Bessie Holcomb. They homesteaded a scrappy piece of land near the Dalles. Wikipedia calls her the first publically known lesbian on the West Coast. I suspect that they mean publically known and historically remembered.

Holcomb also taught school, and in 1893, when the superintendent wouldn’t pay her what he’d agreed to, Equi waited outside his office until he came out, then publically horsewhipped him. He wasn’t a popular guy, so people auctioned off the horsewhip and gave the proceeds to Holcomb and Equi.

In 1897, they moved to San Francisco so that Equi could train as a doctor, which she could do despite not having finished high school.

Equi then moved to Portland, without Holcomb, and ran a medical practice, where she focused on working-class women and children’s health.

She was part of a team of doctors, and the only female doctor, who helped after the San Francisco earthquake.

She was a well-known abortion provider, serving rich and poor women, at different rates.

She disseminated information about birth control when that was illegal. In 1916, she was arrested with Margaret Sanger for distributing Sanger’s birth control booklet, which suggested that (gasp!) sex might be fun. The historical record includes spicy love letters she wrote to Sanger, so presumably Sanger’s booklet knew what it was talking about.

Starting around 1905, Equi made a life with a woman named Harriet Speckart, who was the niece of the founder of Olympia Brewing Company. Because of her family’s intolerance of this relationship, Speckart had to battle to get her inheritance.

In 1915, Equi and Speckart adopted a daughter, Mary, in one of the earliest known-to-modern-history same-sex adoptions. Equi and Speckart eventually parted ways but were close until Speckart’s death in 1927. Mary went on to be Oregon’s first female pilot.

Equi was active in lots of Progressive campaigns, including Oregon’s women’s suffrage movement. She became radicalized after being drawn into a cannery workers strike in 1913, and getting clubbed by the police. After that she identified as a socialist and anarchist and worked along the Wobblies on workers campaigns, her professional status making her a visable spokesperson.

During the preparedness rallies leading up to World War One, Equi spoke out against the war, and drove her car alone into the middle of a parade with a sign protesting sending troops to war. She was tried for sedition under the shiny new Espionage Act, and spent ten months in San Quentin, a sentence reduced by Woodrow Wilson.

Back in Portland, she returned to medicine and to politics. She invited Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW leader, to live with her from 1926-36 and help raise her daughter.

She retired after a heart attack in 1930, and died in 1952. She’s buried next to Speckart in Portland.

There are lots and lots of tribute articles, podcasts, documentaries, and even a bar in her honor.

If this reads like research notes, it is.

I don’t think Equi will be a character in my novel, but her existance makes space for my characters to exist. She may be the Pacific Northwest’s first horsewhipping lesbian anarchist doctor abortionist labor-activist felon mother with famous lovers, and she may even be our only one. But that means that there were other women out there less famously doing some combination of those things. How many other women were out there horsewhipping assholes, or picketing canneries or loving other women or holding radical political ideals? Absolutely a non-zero amount.

How little of life makes the record. What vivid lives exist all around its edges.

As for fiction, it’s like a cloud. It just needs that speck of dirt to coelesce around.