The year was probably 1975. The scene was the empty second floor of a free community clinic in Waverly. The event was a monthly dance for Baltimore lesbians.

Ruth Meeron and Cindy Farquhar were always there to enjoy a night of swaying, snacking and socializing — until a clinic employee one day decided they didn’t want a gay dance upstairs, Farquhar said. They tried to cancel the event under the guise that the floor was not strong enough to host a group of dancing women every month.

At a public meeting for the women to protest the decision, Meeron stood up to speak. She was one of the state’s first female contractors and had inspected the floor herself. It was structurally sound, Farquhar remembers her friend saying, and there was no reason to cancel the dance. The meeting ended promptly afterward.

“There was no more to say,” Farquhar said. “That was the end of that little homophobic attempt. She saved us.”

Meeron was the kind of woman who made an impression, her friend said — one that carries on decades later and after her death. Meeron, a civic activist, feminist and spiritualist who encouraged other women to become contractors, died Jan. 6 of pneumonia and the flu. She was 93.

Meeron was born Aug. 7, 1932, in the Bronx, New York, the only child of Selma and Arnold Muller. After her parents divorced, Ruth lived with her mother, who often took her to services at Central Synagogue in Manhattan.

Ruth was a smart child with an early knack for fixing things, said her daughter, Maia Meeron. In elementary school, she repaired a broken plug on her mother’s lamp and scored a 157 on an IQ test.

Meeron went to Barnard College to study American history and sociology, where she amassed a diverse group of friends and played basketball, her daughter said.

After graduating, she moved to Chicago for a job in social work. She met her husband, Emmanuel Meeron, an Israeli Holocaust survivor, during a camping trip sponsored by the University of Chicago.

They married after two months of dating. A few years later, they had two children, Maia and Ori.

Emmanuel’s work brought the Meerons to the West Coast for a few years, then to Belgium and Israel before the family moved to the Chicago area in 1964. Ruth was an independent woman, and being a stay-at-home mom made her depressed, her daughter said. She got a part-time job at a dictionary company, where she worked until Emmanuel got an offer from Johns Hopkins University, bringing the family to Baltimore.

Soon after, he lost his job, and the couple decided to separate. Ruth planted roots in Maryland.

She became a social worker at Bayview Hospital and moved her children to an apartment in Catonsville. She found her community in feminist and progressive advocacy groups, protesting the Highway to Nowhere and helping found and fund a women’s counseling center.

“She was all about taking action,” Maia Meeron said. “She was very intellectual, and she loved discussing things, but at a certain point, she’s like, ‘Enough with that. We need to do something about it.’”

She also scanned the Baltimore City Paper for local events and enjoyed attending lectures, art galleries and theater shows. She came out to her children as gay.

When her kids were teenagers, Ruth realized she needed to find a job that paid more than social work. She experimented with auto mechanics and tried selling life insurance. Finally, she decided she wanted to be either a neurosurgeon or an architect — and the latter was a lot easier to accomplish. She started looking for construction jobs and moved to Randallstown.

The first company she called wouldn’t hire her because she was a woman, but she persisted and got her start finishing drywall. Maia remembers coming home one day to hear click-clacking in the apartment, finding her mother practicing walking on stilts to work on ceilings.

She became a licensed contractor in 1973 and started a business called Women Working. She did that for almost a decade before her life was suddenly upended. Her son, Ori, died in a drowning accident abroad. She was so devastated she couldn’t work for six months, her daughter said.

Slowly, though, she found herself again by returning to work, first for city facilities and then at Jubilee Baltimore, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing. She also pursued a master’s degree in applied psychology.

In the ’80s, Ruth Meeron joined the board of The Loading Dock, a building materials supply center. Hope Cucina, then the director of the organization, looked to Meeron as a mentor for her people skills and solid business sense. Meeron helped her navigate the first time she had to fire an employee.

“She just was solid, straightforward,” Cucina said. “You didn’t have to guess anything with her.”

Meeron was known for her no-nonsense approach in other areas of her life. When Maia turned 21, Meeron told her daughter she was too old to call her ‘Mommy,’ so she had three options: Ma, Mom or Ruth.

While Meeron was culturally Jewish, she was religiously curious and in the ’90s started embracing goddess spirituality, a term for worship of the divine feminine.

She met some of her enduring friends through her spiritual excursions and an annual goddess festival in Pennsylvania. She was a “crone,” or an elder in the community, and highly respected.

Meeron had a vocal cord disorder, which made it difficult for her to talk, but “when she spoke, everybody stopped to listen to what she was saying,” said Harriette Wimms, whom Meeron called her chosen daughter. “Ruth was the kind of person who commanded a presence with a whisper.”

At festival rituals, Meeron would keep speeches short by simply banging her wooden staff and cackling before declaring, “Too many words!” said longtime friend Cherie Ackerson.

Sometimes her bluntness rubbed people the wrong way, said Shelley Graff, another festival attendee. But really, she just wanted to help them “communicate and function together more effectively.”

Meeron maintained her strength and sense of independence well into old age, and never lost her passion for social justice, loved ones said. At her funeral, Wimms had the comforting thought that Meeron is now helping to fight injustice “on the other side of the veil.”

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