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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 Fort Wayne City Council — the first woman on that body. The Journal Gazette's front page and Peggy Seigel's study in the Indiana Magazine of History identify her as the first woman elected to any office in Indiana, and the Indiana Commission for Women carries her in that place. That statewide claim is contested and is printed here as a claim: an Indianapolis account argues the honor belongs to Mary E. Nicholson, elected to the Indianapolis public school board in November 1909 — an office women could seek before general suffrage — and no source reached for this record settles the two claims against each other. What is not contested is the Fort Wayne fact: Dinklage's 1921 election is the city's first of a woman to office, documented in the Government chapter's table of firsts, and she went on to serve as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1924. The council succession itself is in the Government chapter; the women who followed her into the city's offices are gathered in the firsts entry below.
Sources: the Government chapter of this record (the table of firsts — the 8 November 1921 election, the Journal Gazette front page, Seigel's identification); the Political Graveyard (Dinklage's party and 1924 convention role); Indypolitan, "1920: Indy prepares for a flood of first-time female voters" (the Nicholson 1909 school-board claim, printed as the counterclaim).