Mary A. Cooke Thompson

Mary Anna Cooke Thompson (1825–1919) was a leader in the first generation of women's rights activists in Oregon and one of Oregon's pioneer doctors, who broke through the barriers to women in medicine.

Biography Mary Anna Cooke Thompson was born in New York on 14 February 1825. Mary was their first daughter and second child. The couple met while emigrating to New York, where they would get married later on, in 1821. Of ten children the Cookes had, only seven survived to adulthood. After Mary turned eight, she was removed from school to help her mother with her siblings. A year later, after moving to New Jersey and remaining in charge of taking care of her brother and sisters, Mary started selling wooden novelty items handmade by her father on the streets of Newark, helping with the income of her household.

In 1837, when Mary was about twelve, she moved to Chicago with her parents and there she met a carpenter from Pennsylvania, Reuben Thompson (1815–1885). For that reason, Mary Anna Cooke Thompson didn't have any degree, and, according to Ward (2012), she began her medical studies a year after her marriage, in 1849. In 1855, Thompson joined the first women's rights society in Illinois and a year later, she formed the first women's club in the same state with three other women. The new association rapidly spread, and in 1861, these efforts were rewarded with the Women's Property Act, which granted women control of the property they brought into the marriage. Mary's experience as a physician led her to be concerned with the condition of women and children, especially about childbirth. She also helped with the Underground Railroad and saved the lives of several children and mothers that were being pursued. The Thompsons opened their home to well-known leaders of the Abolitionist Movement, such as Parker Pillsbury. According to Ward (2012), who found her information in the archives of The New Northwest, Duniway's newspaper, Thompson was always a central figure through all of Oregon's suffrage campaigns, until the victory in 1912. H. P. Thompson defines this movement as "a social reform movement that pursued many approaches to limit or prohibit the use and/or sale of alcoholic beverages" and "arguably the longest-running reform movement in US history, extending from the 1780s through the repeal of national prohibition in 1933.".

Mary Anna Cooke Thompson was really involved in this movement along with her friends, Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, an American physician, and Frances Fuller Victor, an American historian and author. After Oregon's first defeat of woman suffrage in 1874, Thompson, along with other movement mates, challenged Duniway's leadership of the Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association. Indeed, she was convinced that giving voting rights to women would be a solution to put an end to corruption. Lucretia Mott, an abolitionist and fellow member of the women's suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of The Declaration of Sentiments, and Lucy Stone.

In 1905, Mary Anna Cooke Thompson went to the 37th Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which was held in Portland, Oregon, in the First Congregational Church, from June 28 to July 5, 1905. The convention was presided over by Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Scott Duniway was also present. As we can see on the Convention Program, available in the Digital Collections of Lewis & Clark College, Mary Thompson participated in the Convention on Thursday, June 28, in the afternoon, and was representing the Woman's Henry George League. Indeed, she was also in favor of political and economic change

Later years In her later years, was known, thanks to her journal and personal introspective passages, that she had a difficult domestic relationship with her husband and struggles with mental health that she feared would limit her work. Ward (2012) cites Mary Anna Cooke Thompson's journal: "The same terrible depression comes over me from this letter that affected me before I left home" and "may the loved ones who watch over me guide and direct me into the right paths, and may my judgement be quickened that I may accomplish the work that is for me to do". Thompson was pleased with the proceedings and her role. "I represented 'The Pacific Slope and the Claims of the Working class'," she wrote in her journal.

She believed that the influence of women would purify the laws of the land and it would effectively address the social and economic issues that the nation faced. Thompson's rhetorical exigence for woman suffrage was based on both, justice, recognizing the right of women to exercise the political power of the ballot, and expediency arguments, claiming that society as a whole would benefit from the exertion of women's moral influence through suffrage.