(February 1, 2025) Since inauguration day 2025, reports have emerged about massive proposed and actual funding cuts to services for vulnerable people; public slurs against people with disabilities; and cancellations of programs and observance days that honor women, people of color, Native Americans, Holocaust victims, the LGBTQ+ community, people who are part of the Asian American Pacific Islander and Hispanic communities and others who make up the fabric of America.
As a nonpartisan nonprofit organization since 2004, Maryland Women’s Heritage Center (MWHC) has always maintained political neutrality.
We work to simply inspire Maryland women and girls to expect and demand equality by telling and preserving stories of courageous and accomplished women, past and present.
Now, though, we are thinking more than usual about the women we have honored for the past several decades and how they resisted injustice, inequality, sexism, misogyny and violence. Many took risks to fight for their own rights and for those of their neighbors and the generations yet to come. Some went to jail for their activism.
We owe it to them to use our voice, programs and advocacy to join the fight for what is right.
Our Executive Director and Board of Directors will meet in early February to discuss new strategies to fight for justice and equality for women and girls while still honoring our mission to “add HERstory to history to tell OUR story.”
Talk to us with your ideas, insights and feedback. Better yet, join us! Contact Diana M. Bailey, Executive Director or Kathi Santora, Board President.
(Below) Suffragists on their way to Washington via Hyattsville, MD, July 31, 1913; W.R. Ross, Washington, D.C. (Photographer); Public domain, Library of Congress.
Join us to fight back for equality for all
Attend our virtual programs and donate to them as you can. View our past and upcoming programs. (Switch to ”list view” when you reach the link.)
Volunteer for us. We need writers, researchers, marketing/social media and graphic arts skills to further our mission. Contact Diana M. Bailey, , Executive Director: mwhcdiana@gmail.com and/or Kathi Santora, Board President: president@mdwomensheritagecenter.org.
Sponsor an upcoming program or one of our women’s artist receptions.
Find corporate or community sponsors who will help us sustain our mission into the future.
Help us connect with upcoming generations of young women.
Ask your friends and colleagues to sign up for our newsletter.
Elizabeth Chew Forbes (Harford County)
Harford County’s Elizabeth Chew Forbes was a wife, mother and part-time Fallston farmer in the early 1900s. On February 9, 1919 she was one of 65 suffragists who were arrested for burning President Wilson in effigy at the famous Watch Fire Demonstration. She spent five days in the District Jail.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge (Dorchester County)
Gloria Richardson Dandridge’s hometown of Cambridge became the center of a fight for economic justice and equality in the turbulent 1960s. Gloria emerged as one of Maryland’s most influential civil rights advocates, famously pushing away the barrel of a rifle pointed at her by a National Guardsman. In July, 1963, while the National Guard still occupied the city, Gloria met with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to negotiate the Treaty of Cambridge, an agreement covering desegregation, housing and employment issues.
Bea Gaddy (Baltimore City)
Bea Gaddy is a Baltimore legend. In 1981, she won $250 in the Maryland State Lottery and used it to serve about 40 of her neighbors a Thanksgiving Day dinner. Since then, the Bea Gaddy’s Thanks for Giving Campaign has become an annual tradition in Baltimore, with hundreds of volunteers serving 3,000 meals on site and delivering 50,000 more to those who cannot travel. Locals called her the “Mother Teresa of Baltimore.”
