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Published On 9/27/2023
Watch the 2023 Mayoral and City-Wide Candidate Forums for Muncie, Indiana. Find links to local news coverage as well.
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Published On 8/31/2023
Laura Janney will be our speaker at the Annual Garden Party of 2023.
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Published On 8/16/2023
Our annual Garden Party is BACK! Let's get registered and plan for a great time to come together again for DEMOCRACY!
Friday, September 8, 2023
5:30-6:30 Social Hour
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Published On 4/7/2023
Local Muncie-Delaware County League member key presenter in library program, "We Can Do It: Notable Delaware County Women of WWII"
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Published On 4/6/2022
Join us for an update on where Muncie is headed in recycling.
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Published On 2/3/2022
The number of non-competitive districts in the currently-adopted Indiana legislative maps prevents Hoosier voters from having a voice in their government. What are our options for regaining our voices?
All IN 4 Democracy, our redistricting reform coalition, worked with Sen. Fady Qaddoura to formulate a constitutional amendment that would remove the mapping responsibility from the legislature....
Unfortunately, the resolution was never even granted a hearing in committee. ...
But that does not mean that we should be quiet and go home!...
On February 7, ... READ MORE
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Published On 2/2/2022
On January 22nd the annual AAUW/LWVM-DC meeting on education issues was presented virtually by Indiana Coalition for Public Education President Cathy Fuentes Rohwer and Joel Hand, ICPE long-time lobbyist. If you missed their review ...
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Published On 11/4/2021
Delaware County election officials who are studying the potential of vote centers in Delaware County. They want to know what citizens think. Answer their survey online and/or attend one of their public meetings November 4 or November 16...
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Published On 7/28/2021
Indiana’s purge law lacks safeguards to prevent removal of eligible voters; district court had issued summary judgment against the state.
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Published On 3/11/2021
Take the survey at https://www.togetherdm.org/speak-up/march-survey
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Published On 2/4/2021
Now is the time to make your voice heard! The 9-member Indiana Citizens Redistricting Commission has been selected from nearly 300 applicants. Its purpose is to demonstrate that redistricting done by a diverse and multi-partisan team of Hoosiers in a transparent process that encourages public participation will yield Congressional and state legislative districts that are fair for all voters.
The ICRC is holding virtual public hearings in all 9 Congressional districts. Hoosiers from all over the state may join these conversations to discuss the criteria for drawing new maps for congress and the Indiana legislature. More...
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Published On 11/13/2020
Virtual Speaker Series November 21 at 10:00 am
​Judge Kimberly Dowling of the Delaware County Circut Court #2
​Shelby Looper, Director of the MPD's Victims Advocate Program. (More...)
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Published On 11/20/2020
“Let the league door be no longer closed to a diverse membership by the finances of our households.

May it be improved and changed by nurturing and employing those unique variations in the sensibilities and talents of all activists desiring to join us in empowering voters and defending democracy for all!” (More...)
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Published On 5/19/2020
VOTE411.org Wins Webby 2020 People’s Voice Award for Best Government & Civil Innovation Website
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Events

Published On 3/13/2023
Join us on Thursday, March 23 at 6:30 pm in-person at Carnegie Library or virtually on Zoom for a local history panel presentation featuring stories of notable Delaware County women who experienced World War II. Stories will highlight the lives of women in the military and civilian women on the home front. The presentation will be brought to life with historical photographs, maps, and newspaper articles.
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Published On 10/30/2022
The weather was perfect for voter education, Mental Health Walk, pet parade, and more, in Muncie on Saturday, October 29, 2022.
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Published On 9/23/2022
2022 Garden Party

The annual Garden Party was held Friday, September 9th, with about fifty people in attendance.

Food, wine and good company were enjoyed and an informative and entertaining speech was delivered by James Williams, a lawyer, former judge, and President of the Muncie Community School Board.

Mr Williams talked about progress and challenges of the school system. He also mentioned hope of future community involvement.
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Published On 9/23/2022
League of Women Voters Muncie co-President Linda Hanson presented the League-sponsored Vivian Conley award to Dr. Courtney Jarrett this year for her Distinction in Civic Engagement and Inclusion. The event was hosted by the Coalition of Women's Organizations on August 25, 2022 in the Muncie City Hall Auditorium. Read more here.
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Published On 4/16/2021
Learn about the newest tool for citizen action!
Get your advocacy toolkit for the upcoming redistricting cycle!
Ranjan Rohatgi, one of the technical experts from the Indiana Citizens Redistricting Commission, will conduct a live workshop on drawing maps using DISTRICTr.org/Indiana. Julia Vaughn from Common Cause Indiana will be introducing the ICRC citizen mapping competition. Register... in advance for this meeting.
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Published On 3/11/2021
Enjoy an exciting panel presentation about the history of the women's suffrage movement in Muncie. This session will tell the story of the women (and men) who battled for the ballot. Learn about some individual suffragists and "suffrage spots" around Muncie. Featuring photographs and maps from local archives. Registration (free) required.
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Published On 2/4/2021
The ICRC plans to hold virtual public hearings around the state to engage Hoosiers in discussions about redistricting criteria and to identify important communities of interest that should be kept together when drawing district boundaries. ALL-IN will also sponsor a map drawing contest and encourage citizens to draw and submit their maps using criteria identified during the public hearings. Winning maps and the Commission's report of criteria citizens consider important for drawing fair maps will be delivered to the legislature (and made public) before the legislature meets to draw their maps this summer.
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Forgotten Foremothers

Published On 3/8/2024
During the Great Famine of 1845-1859, “the blight,” now known to be the fungus phytophthora infestans, ravaged the vital potato crops across Ireland. Starvation claimed lives at an astonishing rate; an estimated 1.5 million people died. Between death and emigration, the population of Ireland dropped by half during these years...

Eva and her siblings were educated at home, learning poetry, arts, and multiple languages. When another “mini-famine” struck in 1879, 9-year-old Eva watched as her father did as her grandfather had done during the Great Famine: he bought and distributed food to his starving tenants and those of his neighbors’ lands as well... Click to continue reading...
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Published On 2/9/2024
The details of Elizabeth Freeman’s birth and childhood were not reliably recorded. Best estimates put her birthyear between 1742 and 1744 in Claverack in eastern New York state. She commonly went by the name Bet or Bett, called later Mum Bett or Mumbet. Her parents’ names are unknown, and even the major events of her childhood—namely, where she was and when—are subject to speculation.

Most accounts suggest that she was born on the property, and as the property, of Pieter Hogeboom, a Dutch landowner in Claverack. When Pieter died in 1758, he bequeathed in his will, “all my negroes and negresses, big and little, young and old, and all my horses and cattle...” to his children.
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Published On 1/12/2024
Hind Taher al-Husseini’s roots in Jerusalem ran deep. She was born there on April 25, 1916, and raised in the mansion home her maternal grandfather had built nearly three decades before. As a child of privilege and wealth, she received the finest education—and then dedicated her life to sharing that education with the most vulnerable: children orphaned by war.
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Published On 12/10/2023
Susette LaFlesche was born in April the year her Omaha tribe abandoned their hunting grounds and moved to the Omaha Reservation. She was less than a year old when the nearby Poncas saw their last great hunt in 1855. The plentiful bison of the past had diminished. White settlers had moved in and claimed the most fertile lands.
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Published On 11/15/2023
Samira Azzam grew up in the Acre district on the coast of Mandatory Palestine in a Christian Orthodox family. She was born Sept. 13, 1927, in a land already in upheaval.

Samira attended public school in Acre, then a Christian high school in the nearby Haifa district. Her life was, wrote Kathyanne Piselli in “Samira Azzam: Author's Works and Vision,” “fairly typical of an educated Palestinian of the middle class.” During Samira’s school years, the Great Palestinian Revolt, also called the Arab Revolt, raged in Haifa, fueled by the poverty and displacement of Arabs that resulted from the mandate’s promotion of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

At age 16 in the early 1940s, Samira started working as a teacher at the Greek Orthodox School . . .
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Published On 10/18/2023
On May 20, 1957, a short article appeared below the fold on the front page of Sanduksy, Ohio’s Register Star-News, reporting from Cleveland. “Bomb Home of Policy Operator,” the headline read. This policy operator was Don King, who made money as an illegal bookie before he turned to boxing promotion years later.

“The home of a known policy operator, Donald King, 25, was bombed here today,” the Register Star-News reported, “but no one was injured. King was alone at the time.” An anonymous tipster, possibly Don King himself, had an idea of who might have been responsible, and where the suspect might be.

The address given to police led them to the door of Dollree Mapp.

--Read more, here:
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Published On 9/10/2023
For National Hispanic Heritage Month, Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías; her life, work, and advocacy.
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Published On 8/15/2023
Donna Tobias
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Published On 7/17/2023
forgotten foremtohers
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Published On 6/16/2023
“Yes, a Crow woman fought with Three-stars on the Rosebud,” author and medicine woman Pretty Shield told an interpreter in 1932. “[T]wo of them did, for that matter; but one of them was neither a man nor a woman. She looked like a man, and yet she wore woman’s clothing; and she had the heart of a woman. Besides, she did a woman’s work. Her name was Finds-them-and-kills-them. She was not a man, and yet not a woman.”

Born in 1854, the exact date of Osh-Tisch’s birth is unknown. The Treaty of Fort Laramie, forged with the United States government just three years earlier, granted her Crow tribe the land around the Bighorn Mountain range of present-day Wyoming and Montana. But like Buffalo Calf Road Woman, Osh-Tisch (Finds-Them-and-Kills-Them in the Crow language) never knew a tribal life untouched by colonizing forces.
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Published On 5/30/2023
Yuri Kochiyama was an American civil rights activist. Influenced by her Japanese-American family's experience in an American internment camp, her association with Malcolm X, and her Maoist and Islamic beliefs.
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Published On 4/22/2023
A surgeon, activist for women's rights, abolitionist, and a spy, she is - to date - the only woman in U.S. history to receive the Medal of Honor. She was born on Nov. 26, 1832, in the Town of Oswego, New York. She and her family, parents Alvah and Vesta Whitcomb Walker and seven siblings (all older than Mary), lived on a farm. Alvah and Vesta were markedly progressive for their time. As abolitionists, they opposed slavery; their farmhouse was an occasional stop on the Underground Railroad, allowing escaped enslaved people a safe place to rest . . .
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Published On 3/10/2023
As the first African American woman to found a bank, Walker made incredible changes.
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Published On 2/10/2023
Charlotte Ray was the first Black woman to become a lawyer in the United States. There is more to the story of her life. Read about this fascinating foremother, here.
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Published On 1/16/2023
Adelaide Knight
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Published On 12/14/2022
She was the first and last Queen of Hawaii. Known for her warmth and dedication, she was a beloved songwriter. Here is her story with some important background information on Hawaiian history.
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Published On 11/12/2022
In her thirteenth year, Virginia Howard lived through Montana’s “Starvation Winter,” of 1883-1884, as the Blackfeet called it. It was a “harsh winter…with heavy winds and deep snows,” which “drove the game animals south…For nearly eight solid months, deep freezes swept across the western part of the state.”

“She was born in 1870 to Joseph Howard and Mary Woods, near Helena, 150 miles or so from the border of the Blackfeet Reservation. Little is known of her parentage but that Virginia was of the South Piegan people, or the Amskapi Pikuni tribe. Montana itself was only a few years older than she was: An Act of Congress first made Montana a territory in 1864 and it would be decades before it was granted statehood in 1889.”
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Published On 10/10/2022
At just 20 years old when Nazi Germany and Soviet Union forces invaded Poland in 1939, Eta Chajit and her father were forced from their family home and into the ghetto within a month. Her older, pregnant sister, younger siblings, and her mother were all gone by then, killed by Nazis. The story of this Polish Jew is one of unfathomable loss and working for a cause beyond herself to eventually build a family of her own.
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Published On 9/10/2022
Dolores was born Oct. 26, 1881, just northeast of Cayambe in San Pablo Urco in Ecuador. Her parents worked as farmers on the Pesillo Hacienda, where the family’s labor was compensated with small piece of land called an huasipungo. As “concierto indians,” Dolores and her family were on the lowest rungs of Ecuadorian society. The Global Nonviolent Action Database reported, “The indigenous farmers were highly attached to their land although their plots were still owned by the hacienda. The renters often expected huasipunguero families to work for free and demanded huasicama, unpaid personal services for the renters’ households.”
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Published On 8/13/2022
The Heike Monogatari, known in English as The Tale of the Heike, is an epic Japanese tale comparable to The Iliad in the West. Its true events have blended with legend and its heroes loom large in poetry, literature, and popular culture. Few loom larger than woman warrior Tomoe Gozen.
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Published On 7/9/2022
A profile of Kitty Cone
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Published On 6/11/2022
On May 20, 1886, a headline in the National Tribune in Washington, D.C. read “A Zuni Princess.” The article recounted, among other stories, the princess buying herself an umbrella after hearing some local women discussing a sale. “She had gone alone to the store and selected her parasol and paid for it, just as if she had been accustomed to shopping in a large city all her life, though Washington is the first city she ever visited.”
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Published On 5/13/2022
With our bodily autonomy once again on the line, this profile and the story of these women is VERY timely. Read and be inspired, and take courage for what may come before us . . .
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Published On 4/9/2022
Estelle Hall was born in 1884 in Georgia. Little of her childhood or parentage has survived the span of history, but her educational pursuits certainly have. She studied with activist and scholar W.E.B Dubois at Spelman College and attended Atlanta University, a private historically Black research institution. She taught in Atlanta for a few years, before moving to Baltimore in 1905 around age 21.
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Published On 3/13/2022
How one woman used the prejudice of the day to spy during WWII.
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Published On 2/20/2022
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans, Louisiana. She graduated from Straight University in New Orleans and worked as an elementary teacher. She was an activist for civil rights and women's suffrage, as well as a poet, journalist, short-story writer, and playwright. Her works include Violets and Other Tales (The Monthly Review, 1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899).
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Published On 1/19/2022
“Her legacy is one of determined belief in human worth, in a kinship that transcends artificial borders, in the steady, dedicated assault on prejudice and bigotry.” Tye Leung Schulze was a woman who generously served her community, interpreting for people in many situations. This is her story.
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Published On 12/15/2021
British poet, Nina Salaman
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Published On 11/18/2021
Buffalo Calf Road Woman is noted as an “excellent markswoman,” but she used a club to knock General Custer off his horse. She fought “out in the open,” refusing to take cover, and “stayed on her horse the entire time.” This, she did, to save her brother!
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Published On 10/15/2021
Thelma Glass organized the Bus Boycott forty years before the famed Rosa Parks made her stand. Here is Thelma's story.
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Published On 9/23/2021
A hardworking, compassionate woman about whom is little known today - but whose work reflects a perspective few had in her time. We have the events, the dates, but few details of the cause, or more importantly, the emotional impact; the true shape and shade of a person lost to time. This is the story of Mary McCurdy. "Her work will outlive empires and the stars."
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Published On 8/13/2021
In 1944, Nancy Wake parachuted into France in the dark of night. A war hero, she was awarded medals that she didn't want, and eventually sold them to pay the bills after her husband's death. “There was no point in keeping them,” she said. “I’ll probably go to hell and they’d melt anyway." She was a tough gal with a work ethic still mentioned to this day.
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Published On 7/20/2021
Among the Osage people, Maria is remembered as “Princess Wa-Xthe-Thomba,” or “Woman of Two Worlds." This is her story.
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Published On 6/10/2021
Of mixed lineage from France and the Chippewa tribe, Marie was born in 1863 in North Dakota during the time of required assimilation, which was a huge part of the atmosphere in primary school years and beyond. The tension between her Indigenous identity and the American "whiteness" would be an ever-present tightrope for Marie throughout her life as a suffragist and her career as an educator.
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Published On 4/23/2021
The Philippine-American War was the environment in which María Orosa was born in 1892 in Taal, Batangas. Her parents were members of the resistance, first against Spain, and then against the United States, all of which would shape María's life in very unique ways. Here was a woman who excelled in career and family, and who is a credit to us all. This is María's inspiring story.
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Published On 3/21/2021
She was a pilot, a race car driver, a veteran, and she had children. Roberta Cowell's incredible story was unlike any other. Her life was marked with complexity, loneliness, and courage.
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Published On 2/15/2021
Marcenia Lyle Stone was born July 17, 1921 in West Virginia to parents Boykin and Willa Maynard Stone. In her teens, she would choose the name Toni as a better fit with her personality. Father Boykin was a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute and served in the United States Army during World War I. Mother Willa was a hairdresser, who worked even as she raised Toni and her two sisters and brother.
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Published On 2/5/2021
Less remembered in history than her son, Poet Langston Hughes, Carrie was a significant suffragist of her time. At age 19, in 1892, she spoke up within her own community of Black Americans, challenging "the male notion" that women were content with their position in life. At that time the position of Black women was one of utter disenfranchisement across every front of life.
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Published On 1/8/2021
“They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone,” said Oprah Winfrey during a Golden Globes speech in 2018, just days after Recy’s death. “For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men... And I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth...goes marching on.”
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Published On 12/11/2020
Our Forgotten Foremother for December gives us a look into the life of the first recorded Black transwoman in New York history: Mary Jones.
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Published On 11/22/2020
“...no nation can ever make real and lasting progress in civilization unless its women are following close to its men if not actually abreast with them.” (More...)
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Published On 10/15/2020
“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” wrote Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer prize winning historian.

The quote quickly transformed from her intended meaning, namely—not that all women should be more rebellious—but that history should concern itself with the actions and thoughts of well-behaved women. (More...)
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Published On 9/14/2020
In 1884, Quaker missionaries visited the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When they left, they took several children with them to White Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Ind. Among them was an 8-year-old then called Gertrude Simmons, the daughter of a Sioux Dakota woman and a white man. Her father had left the family years before and she left despite her mother’s objections. She wanted to go to the “Red Apple Country” promised by the missionaries.
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Published On 6/28/2020
Stormé DeLarverie celebrated Dec. 24, 1920 as her birthday, but the exact date wasn’t a certainty. She was born in New Orleans to white father and an African-American mother who was her father’s hired servant. The two later married and the family relocated to California.
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Published On 4/20/2020
During the 1918 influenza epidemic, Lillian Wald was a general in charge of an army. As chairperson of the Nurses’ Emergency Council in New York City, she organized supplies and led her fellow nurses and volunteers, all women, in caring for the city’s ailing population.
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Published On 6/6/2018
At the eleventh annual National Women’s Rights Convention on May 10, 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper took the stage. She stood before a gathering of the suffrage movement’s dynamic leaders and gave the night’s most memorable speech.
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Natural Resources

Published On 12/1/2022
Our Natural Resources Committee Director attended the 2022 Greening of the Statehouse. This is her report.
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Published On 9/23/2022
The LWV-MDC Natural Resources Committee met on Wednesday, September 21, at Kennedy Library. Herein are the goals and discussion of that meeting.
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