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1839 – 1907
Emma Barrett Molloy (1839–1907): born in South Bend in 1839, and the city’s first suffrage voice in print. With her husband Edward she edited and printed the South Bend National Union in the 1860s, and from its columns argued for women’s rights and women’s entrance into the public sphere — for suffrage, for liberalized divorce law as a protection for wives against financial ruin and abuse, for temperance, and for women’s education. By 1870 she is counted, in the scholarly account, the first woman newspaper editor in northern Indiana. She wrote for Susan B. Anthony’s journal The Revolution and lectured on the reform platform through the United States and in England. In 1872 the Molloys moved to Elkhart and co-founded the Observer there; Elkhart’s record owns that course. What is South Bend’s is her birth, her first editorship, and the suffrage argument made from a South Bend press two generations before the vote was won. Her full record stands in this history’s Women’s History record.
Sources:
- The Women’s History record of this history — the South Bend National Union editorship of the 1860s, the first-woman-editor standing by 1870, the Revolution writings and the lecture platform, and the Elkhart course from 1872