Dr. Marie Equi: Portland's Lesbian Anarchist Doctor

In 1893, a young woman in The Dalles, Oregon, walked into a school superintendent's office with a horsewhip. The superintendent owed her companion — another woman she'd traveled across the country to be with — several months' back wages. He'd refused to pay. So Marie Equi whipped him until he wrote the check.

She was twenty-one years old. She had no money, no formal education beyond a year of high school, and no apparent future. Within a decade, she'd become one of Portland's most respected physicians. Within two decades, she'd be called "the most dangerous woman in Oregon" and imprisoned for sedition against the United States government.

Dr. Marie Equi lived one of the most remarkable lives in Oregon history. She was a suffragist, an anarchist, an abortionist, a labor radical, and a lesbian who raised a daughter with her female partner decades before anyone had words for what they were. Portland has mostly forgotten her. That's a mistake.

The Mill Girl

Marie Equi was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1872 — the fifth daughter in a working-class immigrant family. Her father was Italian, a stonemason. Her mother was Irish. In New Bedford, this meant you were at the bottom of the social ladder, looked down upon by the old Yankee families who'd made their fortunes in whaling.

She lasted one year at New Bedford High School before economic necessity pulled her out. She went to work in the textile mills — the same mills that would later radicalize her when she saw how workers were treated. But in those early years, she was just another girl at a loom, earning pennies, going nowhere.

Everything changed because of a woman named Bess Holcomb. The two had met in New Bedford, and when Holcomb moved west to teach school in Oregon, Equi followed. In 1893, they were living together in The Dalles as what the era called "Boston marriages" — two women sharing a household, sharing a life, sharing everything except the word for what they were.

"She is an anarchist, a degenerate, and an abortionist."

— William Bryon, Department of Justice Special Agent, 1918

The Doctor

After the horsewhipping incident made local papers, Equi became something of a celebrity in The Dalles. She'd stood up to power. She'd won. The local physician, impressed by her nerve, offered to train her as a medical assistant. It was the beginning of a new life.

In 1903, Equi graduated from the University of Oregon Medical School — one of only a handful of women physicians in the state. She moved to Portland and established a practice treating the people nobody else wanted to treat: working-class women and children, immigrants, the poor. She often worked for free.

She also provided something else: abortions and birth control, both illegal. For decades, Dr. Equi helped women control their own bodies at a time when doing so could send both doctor and patient to prison. She never advertised these services. She didn't need to. Word spread among Portland's working women: if you needed help, you went to Dr. Equi.

The Radical

Equi was already involved in the women's suffrage movement — she'd worked alongside Oregon's pioneering suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway — when a violent clash with police during an 1913 cannery strike transformed her into something more dangerous.

The workers at the Portland canneries were mostly women, paid starvation wages to work in brutal conditions. When they struck, the police moved in with clubs. Equi, who'd come to provide medical care, was grabbed by an officer. She stabbed him in the leg with a steel hatpin.

As they dragged her to the police station, whatever faith she'd had in gradual reform evaporated. "I started in this fight a socialist," she announced to reporters, "but I am now an anarchist."

She meant it. Equi aligned herself with the Industrial Workers of the World — the "Wobblies" — who believed that workers should overthrow capitalism entirely. She gave fiery speeches. She joined picket lines. She bailed radicals out of jail. Portland's civic leaders began to call her "the most dangerous woman in Oregon."

The Family

In 1905, Equi met Harriet Speckart — a younger woman from a wealthy brewing family, the niece of the founder of Olympia Brewing Company. They fell in love. For the next decade, they lived together openly in Portland, their relationship an open secret in a city that didn't quite know what to make of them.

Speckart's family was horrified. They cut her off, tried to withhold her inheritance, battled her in the courts for years. It didn't matter. The two women built a life together anyway.

In 1915, they adopted an infant girl they named Mary. It was one of the earliest documented same-sex adoptions in American history. Years later, Mary would recall that she'd called Speckart "Ma" and Equi "Da" — because everyone else called Equi "Doc."

"Equi was "a woman of rare intellectual attainments" but "dangerously radical" in her views."

— The Oregonian, Newspaper editorial, 1918

Equi and Speckart eventually separated but remained close, co-parenting Mary until Speckart's death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1927. They are buried side by side in Portland's Wilhelm's Memorial Cemetery.

The Prisoner

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Equi refused to be silent. She believed the war was a capitalist grab for profits, sending working-class boys to die for the benefit of bankers and industrialists. She said so loudly, repeatedly, and in public.

At a war-preparedness rally in downtown Portland, she unfurled a banner reading "PREPARE TO DIE, WORKINGMEN, J.P. MORGAN & CO. WANT PREPAREDNESS FOR PROFIT." A riot broke out. Equi was arrested.

Under the newly revised Espionage Act — which made it illegal to criticize the government, the military, or the war — Equi was charged with sedition. At her trial, a Justice Department agent called her "an anarchist, a degenerate, and an abortionist." The jury convicted her on five counts.

She served her time. She never apologized. She never recanted. And when President Franklin Roosevelt finally pardoned her and other sedition convicts in 1933, she accepted it as her due, not as a mercy.

The Quiet Years

After prison, Equi's life grew quieter. Her health was failing. She gave up her medical practice in 1930. But she wasn't alone — for much of the 1920s and 1930s, she lived with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the legendary IWW leader who would later become head of the American Communist Party.

Equi died in Portland on July 13, 1952, at age eighty. Her obituaries ran in newspapers nationwide — The New York Times, papers in her hometown of New Bedford, all the Portland dailies. They remembered her as a radical, a troublemaker, a woman who refused to be quiet.

Then Portland forgot her.

The Forgetting

There's no statue of Marie Equi in Portland. No street named after her. No plaque at the site of her medical practice. The Oregon Encyclopedia has an entry. Michael Helquist wrote a biography in 2015. Oregon Public Broadcasting made a documentary. But most Portlanders have never heard her name.

This seems wrong. Portland prides itself on being progressive, on being weird, on celebrating people who don't fit in. Marie Equi didn't fit in. She was a working-class immigrant who became a doctor. A lesbian who raised a family. An anarchist who went to prison for her beliefs. A woman who provided abortions to the poor when doing so was a crime.

She was everything Portland claims to value. She did it a century before Portland figured out how to talk about it.

Marie Equi deserves to be remembered not as a curiosity but as a pioneer — a woman who lived her truth at a time when doing so could cost everything. She paid for it with her freedom, her health, and eventually her legacy. But she never stopped fighting.

The next time you're in Portland and someone tells you the city has always been progressive, tell them about Dr. Marie Equi. Tell them about the horsewhip, the hatpin, the banner at the rally. Tell them about the woman who lived openly with another woman in 1905 and raised a daughter and went to prison rather than stay silent.

Tell them Portland used to have radicals who meant it.