Menifee-Sun City Woman's Club

04/14/2026

Looking to get more involved in the community? This is your sign.

The City of Menifee’s Community Partners program brings together local businesses, nonprofits, and community members to connect, collaborate, and share what’s happening around the city.

Date: Tuesday, April 14
Time: 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.
Location: Menifee Library (29995 Evans Rd.)

From upcoming events to volunteer opportunities, it’s all about working together to make Menifee stronger. Come share ideas, collaborate, and stay in the loop on what’s happening in our city.

03/18/2026

03/03/2026

March 8‼️

01/10/2026

Born into slavery in 1858. Earned a PhD from the Sorbonne at 67. Lived to 105. Her words now travel on every American passport. This is Anna Julia Cooper — a woman history tried to erase.
A baby girl entered the world in North Carolina, her body legally owned by another. Her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, was enslaved. Her father was almost certainly her mother’s owner, George Washington Haywood, or perhaps his brother. The law said she had no rights, no voice, no future.
Anna Julia Haywood had other plans.
By the time emancipation came, Anna was seven years old. Suddenly, impossibly, she was free. And her first instinct was to learn everything she could.
She enrolled at St. Augustine’s Normal School in Raleigh in 1868, eager for knowledge. But the school had limits. Advanced classes were for boys; girls were expected to study just enough to teach basic lessons or support their husbands. Anna challenged that. She demanded access to higher courses. They refused at first. She pushed harder. Eventually, she was admitted — and she outshone the boys.
At 23, Anna attended Oberlin College in Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1884 and a master’s in 1887. A Black woman with two degrees in mathematics in the 1880s — extraordinary by any measure. But Anna wasn’t done.
She moved to Washington, D.C., teaching at M Street High School. By 1902, she became principal — the first Black woman to lead the school. Under her guidance, M Street became a beacon of excellence. Latin, Greek, advanced mathematics, classical literature — she prepared students for top universities while much of America doubted Black intellect. Her students proved them wrong. Harvard. Yale. Oberlin. Leaders of the next generation.
She faced relentless pushback. Racist school board members forced her out in 1906, fabricating charges. But she continued teaching, writing, fighting. In 1892, she had published A Voice from the South, declaring:
> “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind.”
And decades later, at an age when most would retire, she pursued a Ph.D. in Paris. Studying French history and slavery, she balanced teaching, travel, and raising adopted children. In 1925, at 67, she earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne — one of the first African American women ever to achieve such a feat.
She didn’t stop. She taught into her 80s, founded Frelinghuysen University for working Black adults, and dedicated her life to education, equality, and dignity.
Anna Julia Cooper lived through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, both World Wars, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. She died in 1964 at 105, one year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Her words, immortalized in U.S. passports, continue to travel the world:
> “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind.”
Born property. Died free, educated, and impossible to ignore. A revolution in one life. One student. One degree. One refusal to be silenced.
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) — history tried to erase her, but she remains impossible to forget.

01/10/2026

She pretended to be insane —
so the nation could no longer pretend not to see.

September 1887. New York City.

A twenty-three-year-old woman stepped into a boarding house and deliberately began to fall apart.

She paced the corridors.

She muttered to herself.

She refused to sleep.

She fixed her gaze on nothing, as if her mind had slipped out of reach.

Within forty-eight hours, the machinery of authority responded exactly as it always had.

A judge nodded.

A doctor signed.

Officials agreed.

Hopelessly insane.

No questions asked.

No investigation conducted.

No doubt entertained.

She was sent to Blackwell’s Island, to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum — a place many women entered and never escaped.

What no one realized was this:

Her name was Nellie Bly.

And every trembling word was carefully chosen.

She was a reporter for The New York World, and for years whispers had circulated — stories of cruelty behind locked doors, of women swallowed by institutions that profited from silence.

Nellie Bly decided the only way to uncover the truth was to become part of it.

So she did.

Inside the asylum, horror did not lurk in shadows — it was policy.

Sixteen hundred women packed into a building meant for one thousand.

Sixteen doctors responsible for hundreds of lives.

Nurses untrained, exhausted, and often brutal.

And the women?

Many were not ill at all.

Immigrants who could not speak English.

Poor women without advocates.

Women who arrived sane — and were slowly broken by what happened inside.

The so-called treatments were cruelty disguised as medicine.

Ice-cold baths that stole breath and dignity.

Spoiled food crawling with filth.

Beatings for speaking.

Punishment for protest.

Silence enforced through fear.

Nellie stopped pretending almost at once.

She spoke clearly.

She behaved rationally.

She requested her release.

It made no difference.

Once insanity was declared, reason itself became evidence of madness.

She observed everything.

She memorized screams echoing through stone hallways.

She learned names.

She recorded every cruelty.

Ten days later, a lawyer finally arrived.

On October 9, 1887, her exposé hit the newspapers.

“Behind Asylum Bars.”

New York exploded.

Readers recoiled.

Public outrage flooded City Hall.

A grand jury investigation was launched.

And every accusation was confirmed.

Funding was increased.

Staff expanded.

Translators hired.

Conditions improved.

Legal safeguards strengthened.

Seven years later, the asylum was shut down.

But Nellie Bly was only getting started.

She had created a new kind of journalism.

Not reporting from a distance.

Not describing injustice.

Entering it.

She went on to expose child trafficking, factory abuse, and political corruption.

She circled the globe in seventy-two days, turning fiction into reality.

She became one of the most recognizable journalists in America.

When she died in 1922, she left behind more than stories.

She left proof.

That truth frightens power.

That systems survive through silence.

And that sometimes the only way to expose darkness
is to walk straight into it alone.

Today, a monument stands on Roosevelt Island where the asylum once loomed.

It honors the woman who risked being labeled insane
so the forgotten could finally be believed.

Her name was Nellie Bly.

And journalism is still chasing the standard she set.

01/10/2026

01/10/2026

In 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a 17-year-old girl gave birth to a son. The school administrators had told her she couldn't finish high school. She pushed back anyway.
Her name was Jacklyn Gise. And the baby she was determined to raise would one day become one of the most influential people on Earth.
Being a pregnant teenager in 1960s Albuquerque wasn't just difficult — it was scandalous. When Jacklyn tried to return to school after giving birth, the administration told her no. She didn't accept that answer.
"I pushed back and I kept on pushing back," she would later recall. "Eventually the school relented."
But there were conditions. She couldn't talk to other students. She couldn't eat in the cafeteria. She had to arrive and leave within five minutes of the bells. She agreed to all of it. And she graduated.
Her marriage to her son's biological father, Ted Jorgensen, didn't survive. They were both teenagers when they married. He struggled with alcohol. They divorced before Jeff was even two years old.
Suddenly, Jacklyn was a single mother with no money. She found work as a secretary, earning $190 a month. It was barely enough to afford rent. She couldn't even pay for a telephone. Her father rigged up a walkie-talkie system so she could check in with her parents every morning at 7 a.m.
"That's how we were able to stay in an apartment," she later explained. "Because I didn't have to pay for a phone."
Determined to continue her education, Jacklyn enrolled in night school. She chose her classes based on which professors would let her bring her infant son to class. She would show up with two duffel bags — one filled with textbooks, the other with cloth diapers, bottles, and toys to keep baby Jeff occupied.
It was in one of those night classes that she met a young Cuban refugee named Miguel Bezos. He had arrived in the United States at age 15, fleeing Castro's regime with almost nothing. They fell in love.
Mike, as everyone called him, adopted Jeff and gave him his name. Together, Jacklyn and Mike built a home where hard work, education, and big dreams were the foundation of everything.
Jacklyn never stopped learning. Even after putting her college dreams on hold to raise her family and support Mike's career, she went back. In her late thirties, she enrolled again. She was relentless. At age 40, Jacklyn Bezos finally earned her college degree.
"When I graduated from the College of Saint Elizabeth at the age of 40," she said, "I had never been more proud of myself."
Then, in 1995, her oldest son came to her and Mike with a proposal that sounded risky. Jeff wanted to quit his stable Wall Street job to start a company selling books on the internet. Most people had barely heard of the internet. Almost no one was shopping on it.
He told his parents there was a 70% chance the company would fail. They invested anyway.
Jacklyn and Mike put approximately $245,000 into their son's startup. It was an enormous leap of faith. If Jeff was right about the odds, they would lose everything.
The company was called Amazon.
By 2018, that investment had grown to approximately $30 billion.
But the money was never the point for Jacklyn.
Jeff Bezos has spoken publicly about his mother countless times. He called her story "incredible." He credits her not just for the financial investment, but for the foundation she built — the values she instilled, the example she set, the sacrifices she made when he was too young to understand them.
Jacklyn Bezos never sought the spotlight. While her son became one of the most recognizable people on the planet, she worked quietly behind the scenes. She co-founded the Bezos Family Foundation, donating hundreds of millions to education and health causes. She championed opportunities for young people, especially those who faced obstacles like she once did.
She passed away in August 2025 at the age of 78, after battling Lewy body dementia. Her son announced her death with a simple tribute: "She pounced on the job of loving me with ferocity."
Jacklyn Bezos's life proves something important about parenting.
The most valuable gift you can give your children isn't money. It's showing them what's possible by refusing to accept what others say is impossible.
She was a teenage mother who society might have written off. Instead, she raised a son who changed the world — and she did it by changing hers first.

01/03/2026

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01/03/2026

01/03/2026

From left: Principal Dr. Patrice Harris, Jessica Simpson, Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Root. Press release from Menifee Union School District: Advertisement […]