Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair
Bethenia Angelina Owens-Adair was an American social reformer and one of the first female physicians in Oregon.Biography
Bethenia Owens was born on February 8, 1840, in Van Buren County, Missouri. She was the third of eleven children born to Tom and Sarah Damron Owens. The family traveled to the Oregon Country via the Oregon Trail in 1843 with the Jesse Applegate wagon train. The family settled in the Clatsop Plains and later moved to Roseburg in the Umpqua Valley.
At the age of 14, Owens married LeGrand Henderson Hill, one of her father's farmhands.
Their son George was born when Owens was 16. She and Hill moved to Yreka, California so Hill could join the California Gold Rush. She left Hill, and graduated from the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1874 and the University of Michigan.
She practiced medicine in Roseburg, Portland, and Clatsop County, Oregon, and in Yakima, Washington.
She married Col. John Adair, in 1884. They divorced in 1907.
She worked in the temperance movement. Owens also promoted the eugenics movement.
In 1909, she supported a bill to sterilize criminals, epileptics, the insane, and the feebleminded. The bill passed the Oregon legislature but the governor refused to sign it into law. Eight years later the bill became law. A similar bill became law in Washington state, in 1909, largely due to her efforts. Owens was called the "pioneer advocate" of the Pacific Northwest eugenic sterilization movement.
She died on September 11, 1926, in Clatsop County.
