Women's History in South Bend

Women's History

South Bend's women enter the surviving record first as organizers. Before they could vote, sit on a jury, or hold an office, they built the institutions that made those things arguable: a literary club in 1889, a Progress Club in 1895 that bullied an all-male city council into seating one of their own on the school board, a colored women's club carrying a Boston reformer's name into a state federation in 1904, and a suffrage branch whose president used her office to lecture a congressman on the price of food. The ballot, when it came, came in pieces — granted by the legislature in 1917, struck down by the state supreme court that October, granted again for presidential electors in 1919, and made whole by a federal amendment Indiana ratified, twenty-sixth among the states, on 16 January 1920. The firsts that followed were real and slow: the first woman admitted to practice law in the county in 1922, dead at thirty in 1930 and absent from the city's biographical rosters ever since; the first woman on the Common Council in 1963, who nine years later came within one election of the mayor's office no woman has yet won. Underneath the named firsts runs the larger, less-named record: the sewing rooms that employed thousands of women at women's wages, the women who sat down with the men at Bendix in 1936, and the war work of 1941–45 that the city's own chamber of commerce filmed. This section holds that record whole — the movement, the clubs, the offices, the professions, and the work — at the size the documentation gives each piece, with the gaps named where the record runs out.