Marie Equi by Michael Helquist

Born in 1872 to Italian-Irish parents, Marie Equi worked as a child in a Massachusetts textile mill before fleeing to an Oregon homestead with her first long-term woman companion. She put herself through medical school and became one of the first women physicians in the Pacific Northwest, using her status to fight for woman suffrage, labor rights and reproductive freedom. She fought police, shared a jail cell with Margaret Sanger, marched with the unemployed, and opposed U.S. entry into the First World War, earning a sedition conviction and three years in San Quentin. The first well-known lesbian in Oregon, she saw her same-sex relationships figure in two U.S. Supreme Court cases.