The professions: the bar, the press, and the classroom

1870 – 2016

Maxine E. Ryer, the county's first practicing woman lawyer: Maxine Evelyn Ryer was born in South Bend on 1 December 1899, graduated from South Bend High School in 1916 — where she had performed in the first play given at what the Tribune called the first Little Theater ever opened by a high school in America — and studied violin at Nazareth Academy in Kalamazoo, offering violin lessons to South Bend pupils by 1920. In 1921 she enrolled at the University of Notre Dame as its first female law student, and clerked in the office of Frank H. Dunnahoo, a former South Bend city attorney. In September 1922 she passed her examination and was admitted to the St. Joseph County bar — the Tribune announced the admission on 9 September ("Is Admitted To St. Joseph Bar"), and the News-Times reported her coming practice in the county courts on 13 September — the first woman admitted to that bar for active practice in court.

The distinction matters and the record makes it: three women had previously been admitted to the local bar and had not practiced, as the Tribune explained in its "Women At The Bar" survey of 17 September 1922. In April 1923 she was admitted to practice before the federal courts and the Supreme Court of Indiana — "Recognized Despite Sex," the Tribune headlined it on 15 April 1923. She does not appear to have taken a Notre Dame degree — she is absent from the university's 1922–23 student directory — in an era when Indiana bar examinations were still conducted county by county. She married Everett Miller in Michigan on 25 May 1925, and died of heart disease in South Bend on 12 June 1930, aged thirty. The Chicago Tribune's headline stands as her professional obituary: "First Woman Lawyer at South Bend Is Dead." Ryer appears in no People or Famous People entry of this build; the omission is flagged for assembly, and her record stands here.

The bar after Ryer: the next woman of the county's bar in the record is Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, admitted in 1938 — the state's first Black woman lawyer, of the firm of Allen and Allen, one of the city's first husband-and-wife law partnerships — whose firsts on the bench stand in the entry above and whose whole record stands in the Black History and People sections. Between Ryer's death in 1930 and Allen's admission in 1938, and for many years after, the record carries no other practicing woman attorney in the city; the Education Alliance's judgment on Allen's era — "the only female practicing attorney during many of those years" — is the measure of how slowly the door Ryer opened admitted a second entrant.

The press: the women's press record opens with Molloy, whose entry stands above, and reaches the twentieth century in the person of Dorothea Kahn — a South Bend High School and University of Chicago graduate, one of the first women to earn a byline in the Tribune, her bylined feature covering the Notre Dame–Indiana football game of 4 November 1922. The Tribune's press record whole stands in the Newspapers & Media section; Kahn's byline is its documented first of a woman's in the record that section reached.

The classroom and the superintendent's office: teaching was the profession open to the city's women earliest and in the largest numbers, and its institutional record stands in the Schools section; two of its entries belong to this record's line of firsts. Peggy Flowers Eskridge, a Riley High School graduate with bachelor's and master's degrees from Indiana University, began teaching at Linden School in the fall of 1950 as one of the corporation's first two African American teachers — her record in the Black History section. And the superintendency itself: the Schools section documents the office's modern succession whole from 1993, and its first holder in that documented line is a woman — Dr. Virginia Calvin, superintendent 1993 to 2000, under whom the new Riley High School rose — followed in the office by Dr. Joan Raymond (2000 to 2006), the author of Plan Z, and later by Dr. Carole Schmidt (2011 to 2016). The full nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roster of the office is not reconstructed in the record read for this build, and Calvin's standing is printed at exactly that size: the first woman in the succession the record documents, with no predecessor woman named anywhere in the sources read.

The physician's office — a named gap: no first woman physician of South Bend is named in the record reached for this section. The one nineteenth-century woman medical practitioner the search surfaced is of the irregular school: Mrs. Nellie Pine, "the Celebrated Indian Root and Herb Doctress" of South Bend, whose broadside — "Diagnosis of Disease by Clairvoyance!" — survives in the keeping of the American Antiquarian Society, offering diagnosis without information about symptoms, present or absent, on "natural principles" rather than supernatural ones. She is printed at that size, as the era's irregular practice documented in a single surviving advertisement — not as a physician of record, and not as a first. The licensed women physicians of the city's hospitals and practices belong to the Hospitals and Medical records; their first, whoever she was, is not named in the sources those sections or this one reached, and the gap stands open for the update cycle.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, as cited in the standard account of Maxine E. Ryer Miller — "Class of 147 To Receive Diplomas," 26 May 1916; "Little Theater Is Now Open To Public," 4 December 1915; the violin advertisements of 1 October 1920; "Is Admitted To St. Joseph Bar," 9 September 1922; "Women At The Bar," 17 September 1922; "Recognized Despite Sex," 15 April 1923; "Mrs. Miller, 30, Attorney, Dies," 13 June 1930.
2. South Bend News-Times, 13 September 1922 — "Miss Maxine Ryer To Practice Law In County Courts."
3. Chicago Tribune, 14 June 1930 — "First Woman Lawyer at South Bend Is Dead."
4. Lenn J. Oare, "The Genesis of Bar Examinations in Indiana," Notre Dame Law Review 7 (1932) — the county-by-county conduct of Indiana bar examinations until 1931; University of Notre Dame Student Directory, 1922–1923 — Ryer's absence from it.
5. Michigan marriage records, 1867–1952 — the marriage of Maxine Ryer and Everett Miller, 25 May 1925.
6. Indiana Bar Association, "Women's History Month: Remembering Trailblazers in our Profession" (2021), and the South Bend Education Alliance Hall of Fame — Elizabeth Fletcher Allen's admission in 1938, the Allen and Allen firm, and her standing as the only female practicing attorney of many years.
7. Newspapers & Media section of this history (banked) — Dorothea Kahn's bylined feature of 4 November 1922, one of the first women's bylines in the Tribune.
8. Schools section of this history (banked) — the superintendents' succession from 1993: Calvin, Raymond, Zimmerman, Kapsa, Schmidt, Spells, Cummings, Eid; and the credit given Dr. Calvin's administration for the new Riley High School.
9. IU South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, Linden School chapter — Peggy Flowers Eskridge's degrees and her fall 1950 start at Linden, one of the corporation's first two African American teachers.
10. American Antiquarian Society — the Nellie Pine broadside, "Diagnosis of Disease by Clairvoyance," South Bend, as described in the Society's 2026 postings.