Is Today International Women’s Day — 3 Revelations from the ‘Women Who Built Chicago’ Bus Tour
Is Today International Women’s Day is the question refracted through a local project that reframes how a city remembers its women. Urban historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas has teamed with consumer genomics company Ancestry to mount “The Women Who Built Chicago” bus tour for a limited run in March during Women’s History Month. The tour layers archival records and five physical stops to spotlight nine Chicago women whose work shaped education, civil rights, arts and health care.
Background & context: a limited tour, loud intent
The bus tour runs on three dates in March and is explicitly framed as a Women’s History Month event. It will be open to the public on March 21, March 22 and March 28 and meets at Chicago Women’s Park & Garden, 1801 S. Indiana Ave. Organizers pair Ancestry records — census documents, yearbooks and newspaper archives — with on-the-ground locations to surface lives that official histories often minimized or omitted.
Stops on the tour call out a cross-section of local figures: singer Dinah Washington; Margaret Burroughs, co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History; entrepreneur and activist Madame C. J. Walker; Mary Emerson Haven, founder of YWCA Chicago; and Dr. Margaret Hie Ding Lin, who delivered babies for Chicago’s Chinese community when discrimination limited hospital access. A mural installed at 38 W. Grand Ave. Downtown, sponsored by Ancestry, visually anchors the project and spotlights Haven and Dr. Lin.
Is Today International Women’s Day? Tour ties to a month of recognition
The tour’s timing in March makes the question “Is Today International Women’s Day” more than rhetorical: it is an invitation to reflect on how institutional calendars interact with public memory. By scheduling three public dates during Women’s History Month, the program leverages a concentrated moment of attention to place modest, targeted interventions — a mural, five stops, archival citations — into the urban landscape.
Organizers say the work done on the bus is deliberate rather than celebratory alone. The tour combines documentary records with physical sites to reframe familiar streets and buildings as evidence of women’s civic contributions. Project materials stress that the effort is corrective: historical documents often listed women by husbands’ names or reduced them to domestic roles, obscuring leadership and unpaid labor. The project’s use of census records, yearbooks and newspaper archives is presented as a method to reconnect fragmented traces and translate them into public recognition.
Deep analysis, expert perspectives and regional impact
The method behind the tour matters as much as the roster of honorees. Urban historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas partnered with Ancestry to design a five-stop route that foregrounds individual lives within broader civic narratives. The tour highlights nine women whose activities advanced education, civil rights, the arts and health care — a mix intended to demonstrate the breadth of women’s public work.
Nicka Sewell-Smith, an Ancestry genealogist, frames the project as an intervention in archival bias: “Women’s contributions were often reduced to narrow or domestic labels in historical documents, even when their impact was far greater, ” Sewell-Smith said when discussing the project. She notes that some documents prioritized a woman’s appearance over achievement, while others omitted unpaid leadership and community organizing. Tracing these women in records, she added, can feel like a game of hide-and-seek because entries sometimes list women only by their husbands’ names or as ‘keeping house. ’
That analytic frame carries practical consequences. Placing a mural on a downtown facade and programming guided stops translates archival recovery into visible public markers. For neighborhoods whose local histories have been unevenly documented, the tour’s approach creates a reproducible model: locate records; map them to space; tell the story in situ. The project thus aims to shift not only which names are spoken but how stories are read across city topography.
What this means beyond Chicago and what comes next
Locally, the tour encourages residents and visitors to re-encounter familiar sites as repositories of civic labor. Institutionally, it demonstrates a partnership model between a historian and a private records company to produce public history interventions during an attention-rich month. The emphasis on specific archival sources — census entries, yearbooks and newspapers — also underscores the broader methodological tension historians face when reconstructing lives that slipped through official documentation.
The initiative raises open questions about sustainability and scale. Will a short series of dates and a single mural produce lasting curricular or civic change? Or is the project a replicable blueprint that other cities might adapt to surface overlooked women using the same archival tools? As the bus departs from Chicago Women’s Park & Garden this March, organizers and participants will have to judge whether the act of mapping nine lives across five stops is a beginning, a corrective, or both — and whether, on future mornings of recognition, people will still ask, Is Today International Women’s Day?
