• 5:30 p.m. doors, 7 p.m. event |
• Free |
• All ages welcome

“Dr. Anna Ries Finley, the Woman’s Protective Division, and the Mimeograph Machine: Bend Women’s Anti-Violence Activism in the Early 1920s”

Presented by Kimberly Jensen, Professor of History and Gender Studies

Sponsored by McMenamins, Des Chutes Historical Museum, Oregon Experience and Oregon Historical Society

In the early twentieth century, many Bend women worked to achieve more complete rights of citizenship, including voting, jury service, and office holding. Women activists grappled with the question of the rights of women to safety and freedom from gender-based violence, including rape and domestic violence. Dr. Anna Ries Finley served as Bend’s city health officer and, in February 1921, became the head of a controversial Woman’s Protective Division with authority to investigate cases involving women and girls in the city. When a Bend jury freed a man charged with statutory rape two months later, the press accused Finley of producing and distributing an anonymous mimeographed broadsheet protesting the action that included specific details of the investigation. The firestorm that followed reveals the complicated debates about women’s rights to safety and gendered ideas about citizenship and violence.

Kimberly Jensen, Professor of History and Gender Studies
Western Oregon University
www.wou.edu/kimjensen

Author of Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism (University of Washington Press, 2012).