Equi, Marie D.

EQUI, MARIE D. (1872–1952). A physician for working-class women and children, a lesbian, and a dynamic and flamboyant political activist, Marie D. Equi was known as a “firebrand in the causes of suffrage, labor, and peace in Portland in the ‘teens, ‘20s, and ‘30s.” Daughter of working-class immigrants in New Bedford, Massachusetts (her father was an Italian stonemason active in the Knights of Labor, her mother an ardent Irish nationalist), Equi worked in the textile mills during her youth. In 1890 she moved to Oregon and in 1903 graduated from the University of Oregon’s medical school. By 1905 Equi was active in both the woman suffrage movement and the Progressive Party. In 1911 she helped found Oregon’s Eight-Hour Day League. During this period she began her lifelong work of distributing contraceptive information and performing illegal abortions. She also lived openly as a lesbian.

Equi’s radicalism was sparked in 1913 by a militant strike of immigrant women cannery workers, led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Thereafter she worked mainly with the IWW regarding lumber workers, the unemployed, and the homeless. She also provided care to victims of the 1916 Everett Massacre and, as Oregon’s representative, scattered Joe Hill’s ashes to the wind in an international ceremony to commemorate the first anniversary of his execution. Shifting her focus from suffrage work, Equi championed direct action to hasten women’s full emancipation. In 1916 she revised Margaret Sanger’s pamphlet on birth control, Family Limitation, to make it more accurate medically, and the two were arrested at a Portland birth control demonstration that summer.

With the onset of World War I Equi joined the American Union against Militarism to fight against preparedness, conscription, and imperialism and played an important role in local anti-war rallies. In 1918 she was arrested for making an anti-war speech. Convicted under the Espionage Act, she served time in San Quentin from 1920 to 1921. After her release, Equi grew less active politically. From 1926 to 1936 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn lived with her. In 1934 Equi performed her last documented public political act, giving a large donation to men wounded in a West Coast longshoremen’s strike. She also demanded that she be listed at the top of Portland police’s “Red List,” under the rubric of “Queen of the Bolsheviks.” She died a virtually forgotten woman.

Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.

Helquist, Michael. Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2015.

Krieger, Nancy. “Queen of the Bolsheviks: the hidden history of Dr. Marie Equi.” Radical America. 17(5, 1983):55-73.

U.S. National Library of Medicine. “Changing the Face of Medicine: Biography – Dr. Marie Diana Equi.” First published: 14 October 2003. Last reviewed: 03 June 2015. https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_103.html ; accessed: 13 August 2020.