Women in the Professions and Business

Homemaking and farming were the first occupations of pioneering Indianapolis women who settled in the city along with men in the early 1820s. As Indianapolis grew, women such as Elizabeth Nowland and poet Sarah T. Bolton began to operate taverns and inns for travelers. Widows continued operating farms and businesses they began with their deceased spouses. Some women made a living as prostitutes during the railroad and canal building booms that hit Indianapolis in the 1830s and 1840s. During the 1850s, others began working as actors and educators. Young women with as little as an eighth-grade education found their first professional jobs as teachers, chosen over men because they could be paid less.

Women’s colleges and coed colleges educated upper class women, although not necessarily for employment outside the home. Numerous college-educated women joined civic organizations using their educations and leadership skills to establish many of Indianapolis’ schools, hospitals, cultural centers and social services agencies and programs. The overwhelming predominance of women in professional social work today is rooted in those early volunteer endeavors.

During the 1860s, the Civil War left women in charge of farms and businesses as the men marched off to fight. This war also opened up the field of nursing for Indianapolis women who volunteered in hospitals set up to care for wounded soldiers. Jane Merrill Ketcham, Catherine Merrill, Bettie Bates, Jane Graydon, Caroline Test Coburn, and Adelia Carter New, among others, served as nurses. Some of them, such C. Annette Buckel, a physician, also handled administrative and supervisory duties. Yet, formal nurses’ training was not available in Indianapolis until 1883, and the Indiana State Nurses Association was not founded in the city until 1904.

Women were participating in the business community of Indianapolis in the 1870s, but chroniclers recorded little about them. In Sketches of Prominent Citizens of 1876, author John Nowland lists pages of men’s names and only one woman, his mother, Elizabeth Nowland. However, this biographical sketch, which describes her as a devoted mother and friend to all, does not mention that she is the same woman who ran a tavern in the 1830s. The 1893 Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana lists over 100 men and only nine women. These nine were educators, librarians, an elocutionist, a writer, a farmer and a florist.

Women began moving into business as typists and secretaries during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1893 there were three women reporters working on Indianapolis’ daily newspapers. Some businesswomen and female attorneys started as secretaries or court reporters; one such was Indiana’s first female attorney, Antoinette Dakin Leach, born in Indianapolis in 1859. Leach was admitted to practice after appealing to the Indiana Supreme Court in 1893 when her application to the Sullivan, Indiana, bar was denied. She later practiced in Indianapolis in the firm of Enslow and Leach until her retirement in 1917. However, it was not until 1931 that eight Indianapolis women helped found the Indiana Women Lawyers Association and later held annual joint meetings with female physicians in efforts to repeal legislative and traditional restrictions on female professionals.

Early in the 20th century, Madam C.J. Walker’s cosmetics and hair care business made her one of Indianapolis’ and the nation’s wealthiest Black women at the time. She trained her door-to-door agents and gave many Black women their first start in business. Prejudice kept Black women segregated except as domestic workers until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but many supported themselves and their families as teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists, social workers, and businesswomen in their own neighborhoods. In 1900, Lillian Thomas Fox became the first Black columnist for the Indianapolis News. She, Dr. Beulah Wright Porter, Ida Webb Bryant, and members of the Woman’s Improvement Club later helped establish (1905) and run a tuberculosis camp to care for infected Black residents.

During the first half of the 1900s, women continued to broaden their professional and business opportunities. Indiana’s Federation of Business and Professional Women began in Indianapolis in 1913. The labor shortages on the home front during World Wars I and II allowed women to enter some occupations previously closed to them. In 1957 women made up 32 percent of Marion County’s employment force (a reduction from the 1940s war years), but in 1989 women comprised just over half of the county’s employees. In addition, the positions of the women recognized annually by the early Women’s Council of the Chamber of Commerce changed dramatically from the 1940s to the mid 1970s. The executive secretaries, teachers, and retail personnel gave way to owners and presidents of companies. Ruth Queisser, owner of Ruth’s Cozy Sandwich Shop, was the first to earn the Chamber’s “Businessman [sic] of the Year” award in 1972.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, the number of women in many business and professional fields significantly increased. In 1979 only 9 percent of the Indianapolis police force were women, and there were no female firefighters. Lawsuits and threats of lawsuits changed that. By the early 1990s, 15 percent of “sworn officers” (and 75 percent of civilian employees) in the Indianapolis Police Department were women, and the Indianapolis Fire Department had 21 female (approximately 3 percent) firefighters. Women continued to be heavily represented in the field of education, comprising almost four-fifths of all teachers in Indianapolis Public Schools as of 1992. There was also a significant movement of women into the legal profession during the 1980s and 1990s, a change reflected in the membership of the Indianapolis Bar Association which by 1994 was about one-fifth women.

The difficulty of breaking the so-called glass ceiling, cited by 1990 U.S. Department of Labor report, is one reason why women started their own businesses. A rarity, businesswoman Ardath Burkhart served on the boards of 12 different businesses and organizations in 1972, yet a 1990 survey found that only 9 percent or 25 of 278 officers, senior managers, and directors of the ten largest companies headquartered in Indianapolis were women. In fact, few top businesses and law firms reported more than one woman at the top level, on their boards, or as partners.

*Note: This entry is from the original print edition of the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994). We are currently seeking an individual with knowledge of this topic to update this entry.