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Watch the 2023 Mayoral and City-Wide Candidate Forums for Muncie, Indiana. Find links to local news coverage as well.

Laura Janney will be our speaker at the Annual Garden Party of 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

Local Muncie-Delaware County League member key presenter in library program, "We Can Do It: Notable Delaware County Women of WWII"

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

The weather was perfect for voter education, Mental Health Walk, pet parade, and more, in Muncie on Saturday, October 29, 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.

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.

For National Hispanic Heritage Month, Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías; her life, work, and advocacy.

“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.

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 . . .

As the first African American woman to found a bank, Walker made incredible changes.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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 . . .

How one woman used the prejudice of the day to spy during WWII.

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).

“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.

British poet, Nina Salaman

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!

Thelma Glass organized the Bus Boycott forty years before the famed Rosa Parks made her stand. Here is Thelma's story.

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."

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.

Among the Osage people, Maria is remembered as “Princess Wa-Xthe-Thomba,” or “Woman of Two Worlds." This is her story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Our Forgotten Foremother for December gives us a look into the life of the first recorded Black transwoman in New York history: Mary Jones.

“...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...)

“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...)

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.

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.

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.

The LWV-MDC Natural Resources Committee met on Wednesday, September 21, at Kennedy Library. Herein are the goals and discussion of that meeting.