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The first Fort Wayne was fed by women's work: when Harmar's officers counted the Miami towns at Kekionga in 1790 they found some five hundred acres of cornfields, and in the Miami division of labor those fields were women's. The written record that follows is institutional at first, a woman, Mrs. Hulburd, among the first teachers when the free public school opened in 1853, and the city's women presenting the silk colour the 30th Indiana carried to the Civil War in 1861. Organization followed: in 1892 eleven literary, musical and art clubs federated as the Woman's Club League and built the city its library; a generation later the Fort Wayne Woman's Club, a separate body, raised its clubhouse on West Wayne Street. The suffrage fight, run out of the clubrooms and the knitting mills under leaders like Alice Foster McCulloch of the Franchise League, closes the section's first century.
The women of Kekionga · the corn economy and the chief's line
Before the city — the Miami towns at the three rivers
The first Fort Wayne was fed by women's work: when Harmar's officers counted the Miami towns at Kekionga in 1790 they found a cluster of villages ringed by some five hundred acres of cornfields, with "vast fields of corn in…
The benevolent era opens · teachers, soldiers' aid and the first societies
1853 – 1887
The early written record is thin, and what survives is institutional: when Fort Wayne's first free public school opened in September 1853, its first teachers were Mr. Mahurin and Mrs. Hulburd — a woman in the classroom from the…
The Woman's Club League · the federation that built the library
1892 – the club movement organized
In 1892 the women's clubs of Fort Wayne became one body, and the city got its library: in that year all the literary, musical and art clubs of the city — eleven clubs, in the library history's count — were called together and…
The Fort Wayne Woman's Club · the clubhouse on West Wayne Street
Organized 7 March 1925
A generation after the League, a single great club: the Fort Wayne Woman's Club — a different body from the Woman's Club League, and the two are not to be merged — was organized on 7 March 1925 under its founder, Mrs. John E.…
Suffrage in Fort Wayne · the Franchise League and the factory chapters
1912 – 1920
Fort Wayne's suffrage fight was run out of the clubrooms and the knitting mills: Indiana's organized movement was old — the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association dated to 1851 — and its final decade had a Fort Wayne command. The…
The first votes, and the first office · Catherine Dinklage
November 1920 – 8 November 1921
Within a year of voting, a Fort Wayne woman held office: Fort Wayne women voted in a general election for the first time in November 1920. In the city election of 8 November 1921, Catherine Dinklage, a Democrat, was elected to…
The YWCA · a home and protection for the working girls
Founded 1894 — YWCA Northeast Indiana today
The workhorse institution of women's Fort Wayne: the YWCA was founded in Fort Wayne in 1894 as a safe place for employed women to meet — the earliest urban YWCA in Indiana, ahead of Indianapolis (1895) in the Discover Indiana…
Women's industrial work · six thousand factory girls
1900 – 1920
Fort Wayne ran on women's hands: by 1920 some 6,000 women and girls worked in the city's factories — one-third of an industrial workforce of more than 16,300, a higher proportion than in Indianapolis, South Bend or the nation.…
War work · the women's half of two home fronts
1917 – 1919 · 1941 – 1945 — consolidated, with cross-references
The campaigns were financed and staffed by organized women: in the First World War the women's organization ran parallel to the men's, and the record names its officers. Alice Foster McCulloch of Fort Wayne was Indiana's woman's…
The caring institutions in brief · relief, nursing and the visiting nurse
1888 – 1920 — cross-references
The welfare state in Fort Wayne was first a women's volunteer state: the Ladies Relief Union of 1888, among the city's earliest organized charities, is carried in the Charities chapter; so is the Fort Wayne Visiting Nurse service…
The 1970s settlement · Fort Wayne Feminists and the Women's Bureau
1972 – 2018
A second founding generation: Fort Wayne's modern women's movement organized in the universities and built service institutions, much as the clubwomen had in the 1890s. Women's Studies at the Fort Wayne campus began in 1971–72 …
The firsts in office · from the council chamber to the mayor's office
1921 – 2024 — the documented sequence
A century of firsts, each one dated: Catherine Dinklage's election to the City Council on 8 November 1921 opens the sequence (entry above). The mayor's office fell twice to women by the succession route before it fell by election…
The modern organizations in brief · leagues, clubs and professional women
1941 – today
The club movement's descendants: the Junior League of Fort Wayne was formed in 1941 — the League's own date; its federal recognition followed in December 1942 — and has invested, by its own account, more than a million dollars…
