Marie Equi

Marie Equi (1872 to 1952) was an American physician who practised general medicine in Portland, Oregon, and put her skills at the service of working-class and poor patients. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to an Italian immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother, she left school early to work in a textile mill before moving west and studying medicine in San Francisco and Oregon, finishing in 1903. She opened her Portland practice in 1905, focused on the health of women and children, and volunteered after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. She also gave out birth control information and performed abortions when both were illegal, charging wealthy patients more to cover the costs of poor ones. Alongside her medical work she campaigned for women's suffrage, an eight-hour workday and radical labour causes, and was convicted under the Sedition Act in 1918 for speaking against American involvement in the First World War. She is remembered as one of the first women physicians in Oregon and as the first publicly known lesbian on the American West Coast.