Wisconsin Women to Know Before Women’s History Month Ends

Vel Phillips

Vel Phillips was born and built her career in Milwaukee, becoming the first Black woman elected to the Milwaukee Common Council and later Wisconsin Secretary of State. She led the long and difficult fight for fair housing, introducing ordinances for years before they finally passed in 1968 after sustained protest. Her work directly challenged segregation and housing discrimination that shaped Milwaukee’s racial inequality. She also broke barriers as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School and serve as a judge. Her legacy is a blueprint for using political office to force structural civil rights change.

Shirley Abrahamson

Shirley Abrahamson became the first woman on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and later its first woman Chief Justice. Her decades on the bench helped shape how civil liberties, judicial independence, and constitutional rights were interpreted in the state. She was known for defending access to justice and resisting political interference in the courts. Her leadership helped normalize women in positions of legal authority in Wisconsin. She reshaped who gets to interpret the law.

Ada Deer

Ada Deer, a member of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, led the successful fight to reverse federal termination policies that stripped her tribe of recognition. Her organizing restored tribal sovereignty, land rights, and political status to the Menominee people. She later served as the Assistant Secretary to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming the first Indigenous woman to serve in this role. Her work is one of the most important civil liberties victories for Indigenous rights in Wisconsin history. It shows how local resistance can reshape federal policy.

Ingrid Washinawatok

Ingrid Washinawatok, from the Menominee Nation, worked globally on Indigenous rights, language preservation, and environmental justice. At age 14, she joined the movement to re-establish the Menominee as a federally recognized tribe. She helped found the Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN) in the 1980s, and worked for the Indigenous philanthropy organization Fund of the Four Directions, which named her executive director in 1998. During that time, she served as a committee chairperson for the UN’s International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples and was an active member of the Indigenous Initiative for Peace. She also lectured worldwide on Indigenous rights and co-produced the documentary film Warrior.

bell hooks

bell hooks earned a Master’s degree in English literature from UW–Madison in 1976 and taught college courses for several years before earning her doctorate from University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983. She became one of the most influential thinkers on race, gender, and class. She started writing her first book — Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which examines racism and sexism from a Black woman’s perspective — when she was only 19; it became an influential feminist work when it was later published. Throughout her life hooks wrote dozens of books. Her work challenged systems of domination and emphasized the importance of intersectionality before it became mainstream. Though nationally recognized, her intellectual roots include Wisconsin’s academic institutions. She reshaped how we understand oppression and liberation across multiple identities. Her writing remains foundational to modern civil rights thought.

Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry attended UW–Madison in 1948, which at the time had very few Black students. Seeing a play on campus by Sean O’Casey about Irish people inspired Hansberry to write about Black people’s lives. After two years, she left college and moved to New York, where she worked for a progressive newspaper called Freedom and wrote plays. She went on to write A Raisin in the Sun, a groundbreaking portrayal of Black life in America. Her work challenged dominant narratives and brought housing discrimination and racial injustice into mainstream culture. She was also an outspoken activist for civil rights and LGBTQ+ liberation. Her Wisconsin ties are part of a broader intellectual journey that shaped her political voice. She used art as a tool for civil liberties advocacy.

Nellie Y. McKay

Nellie Y. McKay was a pioneering scholar of African American literature and a longtime professor at UW–Madison. While she was studying at Harvard, she also taught at Simmons College, where she became close friends with other Black academic women who taught in the Boston area. Realizing that Black women authors were not being studied in colleges and universities, the group dedicated itself to discovering and teaching about the work of these writers. In 1978, McKay started teaching in what was then a new Afro-American studies department at UW–Madison. In 1984 she earned tenure, which meant that her teaching position at the university would be permanent, and she taught there for the rest of her life, at one point also serving as chair of the department. In an obituary in The New York Times, the chair of her department was quoted as saying that McKay was “the central figure in the establishing of Black women’s studies as a presence in academic and intellectual life.”

Julia Grace Wales

Julia Grace Wales came to the United States to teach English at UW–Madison. After war erupted in Europe in August 1914, Wales wrote an essay called “Continuous Mediation Without Armistice.” In it, she proposed that the U.S. organize a group of representatives from countries not at war to act as mediators for the countries at war. The representatives should be experts in their fields — science, economics, education, religion — but not government officials. Wisconsin Peace Society and the Wisconsin Legislature adopted her position, and national peace organizations incorporated her message into what came to be known as the Wisconsin Plan. Wales’s idea has been credited with laying the foundation for international peace organizations like the United Nations.

Mildred Fish-Harnack

Mildred Fish was born in Milwaukee in 1902. She studied and then taught English at the UW–Madison, where she met & married a German man named Arvid Harnack. After graduating from UW–Madison in 1926, Mildred and her husband moved to Germany where she was fired from Berlin University for not being “Nazi enough.” They joined a small resistance group that published an underground newsletter and fed economic information to the U.S. and Soviet embassies in Berlin. The group was discovered in 1942 and Mildred and her husband were executed. In the Cold War years after World War II, Fish-Harnack’s name and legacy were not honored in the U.S., because she and her husband were believed to have been connected with communism. That eventually changed, however, and in 1986, Mildred Fish-Harnack Day was established in Wisconsin on her birthday, September 16.

Ada James

Born in Richland Center, Ada James was a leading suffragist who helped organize statewide efforts for women’s voting rights. She served as vice president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association when Olympia Brown was the organization’s president. In 1911 she organized the Political Equality League of Wisconsin, and she served as its president for two years. She was a leader in the campaign for the state women’s suffrage amendment. After that amendment failed to pass, James and her father both continued to work for women’s suffrage. When the U.S. Congress finally approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all American women the right to vote, all of the states had to “ratify,” or give consent to, the amendment to make it official. James successfully campaigned to get Wisconsin to ratify the 19th Amendment. Throughout the 1920s she was active in movements that promoted pacifism, birth control, and prohibition. Her work shows how civil liberties organizing often intersected across multiple issues.

Anne Nicol Gaylor

Anne Nicol Gaylor, from Tomah, Wisconsin, purchased the Middleton Times-Tribune with her husband and ran the publication for three years. In 1967, Gaylor published an editorial in the Tribune arguing that abortion should be legal. In 1970, abortion was made legal in Wisconsin. But Gaylor saw that it was not enough for it to be legal, because many women still could not get the care they needed. Many did not know where they could get an abortion, and often the women who most needed abortions were the least able to pay for them. Gaylor started the Zero Population Growth Referral Service, which helped women find cities where abortion services were available. To help those facing financial barriers, Gaylor co-founded the Women’s Medical Fund in 1972, and it still exists today as Wisconsin Abortion Fund. She helped over 20,000 Wisconsin women receive abortions. In 1975, she wrote the book Abortion Is a Blessing, explaining the importance of abortion and birth control and describing the struggle to make them legal in Wisconsin.

Zoe Dunning

Zoe Dunning, born and raised in Milwaukee, became a prominent figure challenging the U.S. military’s ban on LGBTQ+ service members. At a protest in January 1993, she said to a crowd of people, “I am both a naval officer and a lesbian, and I refuse to live a lie anymore.” The next time she reported for duty at her Navy base, she was told to leave. Dunning had to go to two different hearings. At the first one, everyone on the hearing board said she should be discharged from the military. Two weeks later, President Bill Clinton announced a policy called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), which then became law in 1994. Under this law, LGB people could serve in the military, but they couldn’t talk about their sexuality. Dunning’s case was heard again under DADT, and she won (even though the strategy she used in her case was later banned), so she was not discharged. While these legal battles were going on, the Navy promoted her to Lieutenant Commander. Dunning served openly in the military for the next thirteen years. She spoke out against DADT and cofounded the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit group that helped people in the military who were affected by that law.

Josie Carter

Josie Carter was a genderqueer-Black drag performer who was part of the resistance during the Black Nite Uprising in Milwaukee, one of the first LGBTQ+ uprisings in U.S. history. The uprising occurred at the Black Nite bar on August 5, 1961 in response to ongoing police harassment and violence against queer people, particularly trans women, gender-nonconforming people, and drag performers. Carter’s presence represents the role of Black trans and gender-nonconforming people in early resistance movements. This moment predates Stonewall and is a critical part of Wisconsin’s civil liberties history. It highlights how marginalized communities in Milwaukee fought back against state violence.

Angela Lang

Angela Lang, born in Milwaukee, is the founder of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC). From a young age, Lang was aware of how race and class affected the lives of people in her community. In 2017, she met with other members of For Our Future Wisconsin and members of the progressive group Center for Popular Democracy to discuss ways to reach out to Black voters. In the end, they formed Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), with Lang leading the organization as executive director. More than winning elections, BLOC's mission is to improve the day-to-day lives of people in their communities and to help Black people use their voices and votes to assert their power within a political system that has historically shut them out. BLOC has become widely known for its silent canvass program. During a silent canvass, a candidate for political office will come with a BLOC ambassador as they canvass the neighborhood and listen to the concerns of people in the community.

Judy Greenspan

Judy Greenspan moved to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin in 1971. Once in Madison, they attended their first Gay Liberation Front (GLF) meeting. Greenspan hoped to find other lesbians there, but they were one of the few women in attendance. Consequently, they organized their own group, Madison Gay Sisters (which became Madison Lesbians). Madison Gay Sisters marked the start of Madison’s political lesbian movement, prioritizing the unique experiences faced by lesbians that were often overlooked by other movements. Greenspan ran for school board in the spring of 1973, making them one of the first publicly out lesbian political candidates in the United States. After the election, Greenspan dropped out of school to become a full-time activist. They moved to Milwaukee in 1977, where they led local protests and boycotts. They also helped plan the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. In March 1988, while living in Washington, D.C., they got a job surveying how people with HIV/AIDS were treated in prisons throughout the country.

Sheri Swokowski

Madison-based activist and military veteran Sheri Swokowski has been a visible advocate for transgender rights in Wisconsin. As a retired US Army colonel, Swokowski is the highest-ranking out transgender individual in the country. She was also the first individual to have her gender changed on her military service record without needing a lawyer. In June 2015, she wore an Army infantry uniform at the Pentagon, the first woman to legitimately do so since it was not until 2016 that women were officially allowed in combat positions. Swokowski’s advocacy for trans people helped bring an end to the ban on transgender members of the military in June 2016.

Source: https://womeninwisconsin.org