LIFE

10 bad-ass women in Indiana history

INDY

This story was originally published in 2013.

Indiana is not a state where women have made many inroads. We've never had a female governor, nor a female senator. Most of our favorite sons are indeed sons, not daughters. But scratch the surface of Indiana's history and you'll find more than our share of women who didn't play by the rules, women who made the state and the world a better place and did so with attitude.

Albion Fellows Bacon

Albion Fellows Bacon, housing crusader
Had two of Albion Fellows Bacon's children not developed scarlet fever, she might never have become a crusader for better housing. But after her children fell ill, the Evansville mother of four went first to their schools and then the city's riverfront slums, looking for the source of their infection.

Her tour of the tenements opened her eyes to the horrific living conditions of her city's poor. In 1909, Bacon drafted the first of many bills to regulate such housing. By 1913, the Indiana legislature had passed a statewide bill limited to Indianapolis and Evansville. Four years later, Bacon was once again instrumental in the passage of a law allowing for the condemnation of unsafe buildings statewide. Born in 1865, Bacon extended her efforts to juvenile justice, child welfare and city planning.

Kathleen Flossie Bailey

Kathleen Flossie Bailey, civil rights activist
Kathleen "Flossie" Bailey, born in 1895, was known in Marion as a voice for racial justice. In the 1920s, Bailey, the wife of a doctor, helped organize the local and state offices of the NAACP. In 1930, she headed up the local chapter, which had almost 100 members, including the white mayor of the town.

So when she started to hear talk that three jailed teenagers were going to be lynched, she lept into action. She tried to get the teens, who were suspected of murdering a white man and raping a white woman, moved for their protection. Her efforts were to no avail, and two of the teens were killed.

After the lynching, Bailey wanted to see the lynchers brought to justice. She lobbied national NAACP leaders to take up the cause and eventually two men were brought to trial, though the all-white, all-male jury acquitted them.

Although Bailey's family was harassed, she organized a successful effort to pass a state law the next year that said any sheriff who allowed one of his prisoners to be lynched would lose his job.

Vivian Carter

Vivian Carter, recording executive
Had things been different, Vivian Carter could have died a rich woman. Instead, she is a footnote in the annals of Beatlesmania and the shadow of Motown.

Born in 1921, Carter worked as a disc jockey at a Gary radio station. Her husband, James Bracken, owned a record store. The two noticed that the music Carter played was hard to find on vinyl, so they founded a record company of their own, Vee Jay Records, using $500 borrowed from a pawn store.

The company signed blues, doo-wop and jazz musicians. The first song they recorded made it to the Top 10 of the national rhythm and blues charts. Pre-Motown, Vee Jay Records was the most successful black music company.

In 1963, they signed the Beatles, engineering the initial release of "Please Please Me." The single sold a mere 5,650 copies. Their next Beatles release, "From Me to You" drew no air time and the label dropped the British band. A few years later, in 1966, Vee Jay records went bankrupt.

Rhoda Coffin

Rhoda Coffin, prison reformer
Rhoda Coffin never did time herself. But through her efforts, she helped improve life for all women prisoners.

Born to an Orthodox Quaker in 1826, at age 18 the Ohio native moved to Richmond, considered the Midwest heart of Quaker activity. While in Indiana, she met and married Charles Coffin, scion of a local banking family. After raising six children, Coffin and her husband opened a Sabbath school in a working-class Richmond neighborhood in 1864. Women, she believed, wielded extensive moral influence .

When she learned that male prison guards stripped and whipped incarcerated women, she sprang into action, arguing for the establishment of separate women's prisons with female wardens. In 1873, largely due to her work, the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls opened, the first prison in the country run by women.

Even after her husband was accused of fraud and embezzlement and the couple relocated to Chicago, Coffin continued to work for prison reform. She died in 1909.

Margaret Ray Ringenberg

Margaret Ray Ringenberg, aviatrix
In 1921, Margaret Ray Ringenberg, then 7, saw a plane land in a field near her family's Adams County home. The pilot offered her and her family a quick ride, and Ringenberg was hooked. With her father's encouragement she attended flight school and completed her first solo flight at the age of 19.

In 1943, she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, ferrying planes around the U.S. during WWII. After a year, she moved to Fort Wayne and offered flying lessons. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, a local radio station hired her to drop 56,000 pamphlets, heralding the war's end, on the city.

After the war, Ringenberg married. She agreed to let her husband golf; he promised to let her fly. Over the years, she won more than 125 racing medals. In 1994, she raced around the world. At the age of 84, she competed in the 29th Annual Air Race Classic, in which pilots fly more than 2,300 miles over four days.

In 2008, at the age of 87. Ringenberg died in a hotel room. She was on her way to an air show.

May Wright Sewall

May Wright Sewall, suffragette
Lest you think that our state did not have its share of suffragists, consider the case of May Wright Sewall. Born in 1844, Sewall founded a female counterpart to the Indianapolis Classical School for Boys (started by her second husband) in 1882 and insisted that the curriculum for girls mirror that for boys. That meant that the girls took physical education, at a time when it was thought to be improper for young ladies to engage in physical activity.

In 1878, she helped found the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society, and from 1881-1883, she campaigned for women's suffrage in Indiana. She later worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. From 1882 to 1890, she chaired the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Locally, Sewall founded the Propylaeum, a social and cultural club for women, and the Art Association of Indianapolis, the predecessor to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In 1920, the year she died, she published a book called "Neither Dead Nor Sleeping," in which she talked about communicating wit her dead husband.

Frances Slocum

Frances Slocum, Indiana abductee
Long before missing children appeared on milk cartons, Frances Slocum was abducted at age 5 from her Pennsylvania home by the Delaware Indians. Although her Quaker family sought to find Slocum, born in 1773, they were not successful, at least not for several years.

Slocum married a Miami Indian chief, Shepoconah, and took the name, Maconaquah, "Little Bear Woman." The couple moved into the area near what is now Peru and had four children. In 1835, a white trader found her living in Indiana and alerted her surviving relatives. Her brothers and sisters visited and begged her to return to Pennsylvania. But she said she promised her late husband she would stay in Indiana.

When Congress passed a federal order to move the Miami tribe from Indiana to Kansas, Slocum's family appealed for an exemption for her and her family. She remained in Indiana until her death in 1847. Nicknamed "the White Rose of the Miami," Slocum remains a matriarch of the Indiana Miami Tribe. An estimated 20 percent are her descendants.

Dorothy Stratton

Dorothy Stratton, Coast Guard officer
Dorothy C. Stratton saw many changes throughout the more than a century she lived. Born in 1899, she became Purdue's first full-time dean of women in 1933. Under her watch, the number of co-eds at the school went from 500 to more than 1,400 and three new women's residence halls were built. She also helped bring aviatrix Amelia Earhart to West Lafayette as a career counselor.

In 1942, she became director of the Women's Reserve of the Coast Guard. The first female commissioned officer in the Coast Guard, Stratton received a Legion of Merit medal in 1946.

After the war, Stratton worked for the International Monetary Fund and served as executive director of the Girls Scouts of the USA. She also represented the United Nations on the International Federation of University Women.

Four years after Stratton's death in 2006 at the age of 107, first lady Michelle Obama christened a Coast Guard cutter with her name in her memory.

Lovina McCarthy Streight

Lovina McCarthy Streight, Civil War nurse
Not many women fought in the Civil War. But when Lovina McCarthy Streight's husband, Abel, became commander of the 51st Indiana Volunteer Infantry, she would not hear of languishing at home. Instead, she and the couple's 5-year-old son went with him. Streight, who was born in 1830, nursed the wounded, eventually earning her the title "The Mother of the 51st." Confederate troops captured her three times, twice exchanging her for prisoners. The third time, she brandished a gun she had stashed inside her skirts.

Although her husband spent 10 months as a prisoner of war himself, the couple survived to return to their home in Indianapolis, where each year Streight organized a reunion of the regiment. After her husband died in 1892, Streight buried him in her front yard, to her neighbors' dismay. Abel was exhumed and reburied at Crown Hill Cemetery.

When Streight died in 1910, she was buried alongside her husband in a funeral that included full military honors and about 5,000 mourners, including 64 survivors of the 51st.

Madam CJ Walker

Madam CJ Walker, businesswoman
Born into a former slave family in 1867, Sarah Breedlove was America's first self-made female millionaire. If you've never heard her name, that's no surprise. In 1905, she married St. Louis journalist Charles J. Walker, and became Madam C. J. Walker, a name that became synonymous with black hair care.

She moved to Indianapolis, where she bought a home adjacent to a laboratory where she made her products. A factory and training school followed.

Less than a year after she moved to Indianapolis, she donated $1,000 to build a YMCA for African-Americans. Throughout her life, Walker supported other civil rights efforts, including donating $5,000 to the NAACP's anti-lynching efforts.

Sources: Indiana Historical Society, Indiana State Museum, Star research, America's Black Holocaust Museum, IU Press (Bacon), Moment of Indiana History (Coffin), Slate, Propylaeum, www.madamcjwalker.com, History of Rock, BSnPubs, www.dermon.com.

Compiled by Star reporter Shari Rudavsky. Star researchers Cathy Knapp and Dawn Mitchell contributed to this report.