Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist (review)

In June of 1913, Dr. Marie Equi stood on a chair in the middle of Portland City Hall and declared that she was ready to “shed blood” for the cause of the women’s cannery strike that began a few days earlier. The doctor also threatened to kill anyone who tried to prevent her from speaking out with a virus-dipped pin that would cause a “slow and lingering death” (119). Five nights later, Equi seemingly followed through with her threat when she stabbed a patrolman with her hatpin, though her weapon turned out to be virus-less and rather innocuous. In the excellent new biography of Dr. Marie Equi (1872–1952), Michael Helquist uses such colorful anecdotes to paint a complex portrait of an early twentieth-century, woman physician who viewed her politics as inseparable from her professional identity. Indeed, Helquist’s long-awaited biography is a valuable addition to the historiography of women in medicine precisely because it offers critical insight into how medicine and healthcare informed the radical politics of one of the most famous women physicians in the Pacific Northwest.

Marie Equi was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts to an Irish mother and an Italian father. Like many children in the area, she spent several years laboring in a textile mill to help support her family. At age nineteen, Equi escaped mill town life when she joined her first longtime companion, Bessie Holcomb, on a homestead near The Dalles, Oregon. Equi eventually decided to study medicine and after graduating from the University of Oregon Medical School in 1903, she joined a small but growing population of women physicians in Oregon’s capital city.

Historians of gender and medicine will be especially interested in Helquist’s detailed attention to how Equi’s working-class background shaped her views on reproductive health. Although it was rather common for women physicians during this period to focus on pregnancy and childbirth, Equi stands out for her devotion to providing abortion services and birth control information, particularly for working-class women. Equi openly advocated for the legalization of contraception, for example, and became close friends with Margaret Sanger. In 1916, during her first visit to Portland, Sanger collaborated with Equi on editing her birth control manifesto, Family Limitation. Police later arrested the two women for distributing copies of the revised text at a protest rally in the city. Helquist’s chapter on abortion work and birth control activism in Portland emphasizes the exceptionality of Equi. It was not her status as a woman doctor in turn-of-the-century America that made her unique, as there were thousands of women practicing medicine during this period. Rather, Equi was unusual because she fundamentally disagreed with many of her female colleagues on abortion rights, birth control access, and even labor politics.

Although Equi’s work as a physician was integral to her political activism, Helquist makes clear that her dedication to medicine also separated her from other leftists, Progressive reformers, and suffrage activists. “Equi was neither a strident advocate nor a rigid ideologue,” he explains. “Her politics were personal, fluid, and eclectic” (11). This pragmatism and malleability distinguished her from radical friends like Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Equi never sought a national platform nor desired to lead a nationwide movement–instead she grounded her activism locally through her medical practice. She also disagreed significantly with many of her sister suffragists. When the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, many women activists suspended their voting demands in favor of patriotism campaigns. Equi also retreated from the suffrage movement, yet she so did to protest the war–a dangerous activity that would land her in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918.

Despite the loss of Equi’s personal papers after her death, Helquist has managed to cobble together a wealth of sources from oral histories, newspaper articles, and archival collections, including a...