Continuing our year-round observance of all the amazing women – past and present – who have fought to break down barriers, we come to Indiana.
Indiana has a unique history when it comes to women’s rights.
Unlike many women’s suffrage movements throughout the nation, in which Black voices were silenced and rallies were segregated, women’s voting activism in Indiana was sometimes unusually integrated.
Black women were openly admitted to women’s suffrage conferences in Indiana throughout the mid to late 1800s.
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson (March 1, 1843 – June 9, 1899), one such suffrage activist, toured the Midwest in the 1860s and 1870s, campaigning for Black rights, women’s rights, and equal rights for all.
Born in Michigan City in 1843 to free Black parents, Anderson was admitted to an all-white school at age 12 where she excelled in writing and poetry. However, she was not permitted to attend college upon her graduation, due to her mother’s death and her father’s devaluation of women’s education.
Anderson soon after married and moved to Chicago, where she began her involvement in the Women’s Suffrage movement. There, she quickly became a rising star in public speaking as she was heavily involved with the International Organization of Grand Templars and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Anderson gave one of her most famous and widely shared speeches at the National Convention of Women’s Rights in 1869.
Unjustly, Anderson was uncredited for her work. White suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony publicized her 1869 speech in their newspaper, The Revolution, but identified her only as “a colored woman.”
After her first lecturing tour, she moved to Ohio and began a hairdressing business while simultaneously taking care of her children and husband, whose health had begun to fail. Throughout the 1870s, she made several more lecture tours in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, promoting women's rights. While living in Portsmouth, Ohio, she helped to organize a home for orphaned Black children.
When her husband passed away in 1877, she changed careers to become a schoolteacher. Throughout the 1870s, she continued to write on the topics of suffrage and temperance in newspapers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
In 1881, she remarried and moved to Wichita, Kansas, where she co-founded another children’s home. Appalled that the white women in her Women’s Christian Temperance Union club had organized a new orphanage that was specifically whites-only, she helped to establish the Wichita Children’s Home, which opened to all children in 1890 and is still in operation today.
Anderson moved to San Francisco, California in the 1890s, and not much is known of her life from that time. However, she continued her activism through writing and campaigned for suffrage in her articles and letters, calling for “justice and... a voice in making the law” for women.
In more recent history, let’s take a moment to highlight Black Indiana legislators Indiana State Rep. Cherrish Pryor, Indiana State Senator Jean Breaux, Indiana State Rep. Robin Shackleford, and Indiana State Rep. Vanessa Summers.
These women, along with the men of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus, are literally fighting for basic respect and decency against racist bias in the Indiana statehouse.
Much like Naomi Anderson over 100 years ago, Black women political leaders are having to fight to be treated with basic human decency, free from prejudice – and race-based discrimination.
It wasn’t right then, and it is not right now. Planned Parenthood is grateful to these women for their work and their voice representing Black Hoosiers in our legislature.
Timeline of Reproductive Health Care Access and Rights in Indiana
Today, Indiana is known to be one of the most anti-choice states in terms of its politicians and proposed legislation. However, Indiana has a long and rich history in reproductive rights advocacy. Recurringly a battleground for abortion and birth control, Indiana has often been a vanguard for offering new services and expanding services to patients while simultaneously fighting to retain rights that have been hard-won.
Indiana’s history also shows a recurring theme of smaller organizations combining forces to gain strength in fighting for reproductive freedom while gaining capacity in serving the most patients.
Here are some of the milestones achieved by activists and health care providers in Indiana over the past 100 years:
1932 Planned Parenthood of Indiana, Inc., originally the Indiana Birth Control League, was officially established.
1933 The League incorporates as the Maternal Health League of Indiana and opens the Maternal Health Clinic in Indianapolis. Only married women with two or more children were eligible to receive medical care and information.
1936 Federal Comstock Laws, which prohibited publication and distribution of information about sex, sexuality, contraception and human reproduction, are lifted. This allows more information about birth control and sex ed to become available, though it is still highly gatekept and restricted.
1937 Four more Maternal Health Leagues open in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Evansville. All of these eventually become affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
1942 First year federal funding was used for family planning.
1955 First year unmarried women can receive reproductive care and information.
1960 Birth control pills were first approved by the FDA for use by the public.
1964 First Indiana Planned Parenthood health center opens in Gary.
1965 Griswold v. Connecticut struck down state laws that made birth control use by married couples illegal.
1971 Family Planning of Madison County, Inc. is incorporated into Planned Parenthood.
1973 U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade decision, recognizes woman’s right to privacy in health decisions and legalizes abortion in all 50 states.
1975 Planned Parenthood health center in Lafayette opens.
1977 Planned Parenthood opens in Fort Wayne.
1978 Abortion services begin in Merrillville.
1987 The East Central region, including Indiana, becomes the first Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country to offer free HIV testing and counseling.
1991 Abortion services begin in Bloomington.
1995 Merger between Planned Parenthood of Southern Indiana and Planned Parenthood of Central Indiana occurred to form Planned Parenthood of Central and Southern Indiana, Inc.
1997 Merger between the Tippecanoe County affiliate, and Planned Parenthood of Central and Southern Indiana, Inc.
1999 Merger between East Central and Central and Southern affiliates.
2000 Merger between central/southern affiliate and affiliate in northwest/northeast established Planned Parenthood of Greater Indiana, Inc.
2004 Merger between Planned Parenthood of Greater Indiana and Planned Parenthood of North Central Indiana affiliates established Planned Parenthood of Indiana.
2013 Planned Parenthood of Indiana merges with Planned Parenthood of Kentucky to form Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.
2021 Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky merges with Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands to form Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky.