The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
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 program dates its inception to 1971, and its first course, in the psychology of women, was offered in the spring of 1972; a Women's Studies minor followed in 1976. The end of that first class in 1972 saw the formation of Fort Wayne Feminists, whose members overlapped the program's founders. The university's fiftieth-anniversary history of the program records what the network built: the same activists who created the courses established or contributed to the network of social services founded in Fort Wayne in the 1970s, among them the Women's Bureau and the Center for Nonviolence. The Women's Bureau became the era's durable institution: it ran the Transitions program for women rebuilding their lives (the Junior League partnered with it and Hope House on a Women's Independence Project in 2007), Harriet House, sexual-assault services, and Dress for Success Fort Wayne. In 2018 the Bureau's programs passed to YWCA Northeast Indiana, closing the institutional arc that had opened with the clubwomen's reading rooms: services founded by one generation of organized women absorbed by the surviving institution of an earlier one. The Bureau's own founding year is known only as the 1970s: the sources, the university exhibit among them, do not fix it.
Sources: (I)PFW Women's Studies at 50: Herstory in Progress (Purdue University Fort Wayne, Scalar exhibit) — the 1971–72 beginnings, the 1976 minor, Fort Wayne Feminists (1972), and the founding network including the Women's Bureau and the Center for Nonviolence; the Charities chapter of this record (the 2018 absorption of the Women's Bureau's programs — Harriet House, sexual-assault services, Dress for Success Fort Wayne); The Post & Mail (the 2007 Women's Independence Project partnership).