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If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Dear Texas and Women’s History Enthusiast,

As we stand at the 120th Anniversary of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) and look back at the more than century of change that has occurred since its founding in 1897, there is a lot to celebrate. The women and men that came together that year had a vision for the study and preservation of Texas history, and while portions of that vision have evolved over time, the foundation remains the same—our shared history is part of who we are. From the beginning of the Association’s creation, women making history became part of the Association’s history, just like they had been part of Texas history all along.

It is my honor to invite you to enjoy Women Across Texas History Volume 2: Early Twentieth Century. In this eBook, we selected articles from the Handbook of Texas Online and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly to provide a diverse overview of the experiences that make Texas history so rich and dynamic. Women Across Texas History Volume 2 highlights the type of incredible content that the TSHA is so proud to offer.

I would be remiss if I did not specially acknowledge the dedicated TSHA staff and our amazing contributors and members—this Association continues to prosper because of you. My graduate research assistants, Elaina Friar Moyer, Mykah Jones, and Anne Poulos have been essential to this ebook and the larger TSHA women’s history projects. Additionally, I receive significant support from my university, Texas A&M University-Commerce, without which this eBook and connected endeavors would not be possible. Many thanks to everyone involved.

Last but not least, we also want to encourage you to log onto https://www.tshaonline.org/texaswomen/ to find out about TSHA’s exciting new project as it unfolds. The Handbook of Texas Women Project is a statewide initiative focused on Texas Women’s History by the TSHA for the Handbook of Texas Online, the many incredible educational and public programs TSHA offers, and in partnership with state agencies, museums, libraries and archives, universities, foundations, and individuals across the Lone Star State. Look around the site, come back often to explore as updates are made available and events are announced, and especially discover the variety of ways you can also take part in the project.

Here’s to the next 120 together!

Jessica Brannon-Wranosky Project Director, Handbook of Texas Women Project Associate Professor, Texas A&M University-Commerce

Women Across Texas History Series i Dear Texas History Lover,

Texas has a special place in history and in the minds of people throughout the world. Texas also has the distinction of being the only state in the United States that was an independent country for almost ten years—free and separate—recognized as a sovereign government by the United States, France, and England.

For more than a century, the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) has played a leadership role in Texas history research and education and has helped to identify, collect, preserve, and tell the stories of Texas. It has now entered into a new collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin to carry on and expand its work. In the coming years these two organizations, with their partners and members, will create a collaborative whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The collaboration will provide passion, talent, and long-term support for the dissemination of scholarly research, educational programs for the K-12 community, and opportunities for public discourse about the complex issues and personalities of our heritage.

The TSHA’s core programs include the Texas Almanac, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Handbook of Texas Online, TSHA Press, and education programs that reach out to students and teachers at all levels throughout the state. The central challenge before the TSHA is to seize the unprecedented opportunities of the digital age in order to reshape how history will be accessed, understood, preserved, disseminated, and taught in the twenty-first century. In the coming years, we will capitalize on these momentous opportunities to expand the scope and depth of our work in ways never before possible. In the midst of this rapid change, the TSHA will continue to provide a future for our heritage and to ensure that the lessons of our history continue to serve as a resource for the people of Texas. I encourage you to join us today as a member of the TSHA, and in doing so, you will be part of a unique group of people dedicated to standing as vanguards of our proud Texas heritage and will help us continue to develop innovative programs that bring history to life.

With Texas Pride,

Brian A. Bolinger Randolph “Mike” Campbell CEO Chief Historian Texas State Historical Association Texas State Historical Association

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Lillian B. Horace…………………………………………………………..…...... 1 by Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

2. Elizabeth Herndon Potter..…………………………..……….………………………………………….. 5 by Ashley E. Miller

3. Minnie Fisher Cunningham …..….…………..…………………………………………………………. 7 by Patricia Ellen Cunningham

4. Christia V. Daniels Adair………………………………….………..…………………………………….. 11 by Nancy Baker Jones

5. Jessie Harriet Daniel Ames………………………………………….……………………………………. 14 by Jon D. Swartz

6. Annie Webb Blanton…..………………………………..…………………...... 16 by Debbie Mauldin Cottrell

7. Anna J. Hardwicke Pennybacker..……………………….………………...... 19 by Stacy A. Cordery

8. Jane Legette Yelvington McCallum………...... ………...... 22 by Roberta S. Duncan

9. Sara Isadore Sutherland Callaway…………………………………….………………………………. 26 by Megan Seaholm

10. Jovita Idár ……………………………………………………………………...... 28 by Nancy Baker Jones

11. Clara Driscoll …………………………………………………………………………………………….... 30 by Dorothy D. DeMoss

Women Across Texas History Series iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

12. Adina Emilia de Zavala …………….………………………………………………………..……..... 34 by L. Robert Ables

13. Drusilla Elizabeth Tandy Nixon ………………………………………………………………..…… 38 by Will Guzmán

14. Portia Marshall Washington Pittman …..…………………………………………...... 42 by Peggy Hardman

15. Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent …………………………………………………………….…….. 45 by Bernadette Pruitt

16. Jovita González de Mireles …….……………………………………………………………….…….. 48 by Cynthia E. Orozco and Teresa Palomo Acosta

17. Lulu Belle Madison White ………………………………………………………………………..….. 51 by Merline Pitre

18. Mary Edna Gearing …………………………………….………………………………………….…….. 53 by Judith N. McArthur

19. Adele Lubbock Briscoe Looscan ………………………………………………………………..…. 56 by Claudia Hazlewood

20. Sara Estela Ramírez ……………………………………….……………………………………………… 58 by Teresa Palomo Acosta

21. Leonor Villegas de Magnon …………………………….…………………………………………….. 61 by Nancy Baker Jones

22. Ida Mercedes Muse Darden …………………………………….…………………………….………. 63 by George N. Green

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

23. Miriam Amanda (Ma) Wallace Ferguson....….…………………………………………….... 66 by John D. Huddleston

24. Edith Eunice Therrel Wilmans ……..……………………………………………………….…. 69 by Edith Eunice Wilmans Malone

25. Sarah Eleanor Cory Menezes ………………..……………………………………………….….. 71 by Allison Faber

26. Bessie Coleman ………………….………………………………………………………………….... 74 by Roni Morales

27. Ima Hogg ………………………………..………………………………………………………….…… 77 by Virginia Bernhard

28. Julia Bedford Ideson ……………………...... ………………………………………………….…. 80 by Sharon Bice Endelman

29. Carrie Marcus Neiman ……………..…………………………………………………………...... 83 by Dorothy D. DeMoss

30. Georgia Totto O’Keeffe ……………………………………………………………………….….. 85 by John F. Matthews

31. Mildred Ella Didrikson (Babe) Zaharias .………………………………………..………..… 89 by Susan E. Cayleff

32. Bonnie Parker ..………………………………………………………………………………….….... 93 by Kristi Strickland

Women Across Texas History Series v SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

33. From the Midway to the Hall of State at Fair Park: Two Competing Views of Women at the Dallas Celebration of 1936 by Light Townsend Cummins

34. "All Good Things Start With the Women": The Origin of the Texas Birth Control Movement, 1933—1945 by Harold L. Smith

35. A Wholesome Life: Ima Hogg's Vision for Mental Health Care. by Kate S. Kirkland

36. Texas and the Master Civil Rights Narrative: A Case Study of Black Females in Houston by Merline Pitre

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century vi Lillian B. Horace 1 By Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

Lillian Bertha Horace, writer and teacher, was born Lillian B. Amstead (or possibly Armistead) in Jefferson, Texas, on April 29, 1880. She was the daughter of Thomas Amstead and Macey Matthews. When she was still a toddler, her parents moved to Fort Worth, where she received her early education. She graduated from I. M. Terrell High School and subsequently enrolled at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, where she took courses from 1898 to 1899. Lillian married David Jones in 1900, but the couple had no children and were divorced in 1919.

After her marriage ended, Jones excelled Lillian B. Horace professionally and academically. Like many other young African-American women in the South, Jones started her teaching career before she graduated from college; she taught in Tarrant County schools for six years, including a school in Handley and five in Mansfield. She returned to her alma mater I. M. Terrell High School to teach English in 1911. There she served as dean of girls and established the school’s library. In 1924 she began the school newspaper known as Terrellife and founded the school’s journalism and drama departments. In 1914 Lillian Jones entered Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), where she graduated as valedictorian. Although she and other Prairie View students were introduced to Booker T.

Women Across Texas History Series 1 Washington’s pragmatic philosophy regarding education, she was determined to pursue more advanced education than the South offered at the time. She demonstrated her commitment by enrolling in summer extension courses at the University of Chicago (1917–19, 1928, and 1940), the University of Colorado at Boulder (1920), and Columbia University (1924). From 1921 to 1922 she worked and studied at Simmons University in Louisville, Kentucky, where she served as dean of women and earned a bachelor’s degree.

Ultimately, Lillian Jones returned to Fort Worth to work for the improvement of the African-American community. She was a devout Baptist, teacher, pioneering librarian, and journalist. She was also a member of the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation (TCIC), founded in 1920, as well as the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Alphin Art and Charity Club, Progressive Woman’s Club, and the Order of the Eastern Star.

In 1916 Jones self-published her first novel Five Generations Hence, believed to be the earliest novel on record by an African-American woman from Texas. Though an excerpt from her novel appeared in Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950 (1995), the complete novel was republished in 2013, in the edited collection, Recovering Lillian Jones Horace: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace.

Through the heroine of the novel— Grace Noble, an educator in a rural African-American community in Texas—Lillian highlighted the importance of economic self-sufficiency, education, piety, and other noble attributes, particularly through the ideas and deeds of intelligent black women. Like other African-American writers of the post-Reconstruction era, Jones used her novel for a sociopolitical purpose and critiqued the exclusion of blacks from American life. Her novel was also distinct in its call for a transcontinental dialogue between Africa and America and the concept that American blacks would eventually return to Africa.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 2 In 1930 Lillian Jones married Joseph Gentry Horace of Groveton, Texas. Her husband later became a minister. In addition to her role as a preacher’s wife, Lillian Horace served as chaplain of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1937; continued to serve as teacher and librarian in Fort Worth; and began working on her second novel, Angie Brown. Her marriage to Joseph Horace ended in divorce in 1946; they had no children. Disappointed by the breakup of her marriage, Lillian Horace nonetheless continued to pursue her desire to write. By 1948 she had finished her first draft of Angie Brown. The following year she attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the book published by Lemuel L. Foster in New York.

Setting aside her earlier dreams of Africa, Horace used Angie Brown to highlight the resiliency of the African-American woman who shouldered the double burden of “being a woman” and “being a Negro.” The novel emphasized the importance of black female bonding and cross-generational ties. Reflecting oral tradition, the novel’s women used stories to convey wisdom and history. Horace also used Angie Brown to assert that economic progress, in addition to social progress, was essential to black advancement. The novel’s protagonists are therefore depicted as savers and sound-minded investors despite living in a community where education stopped at the seventh grade.

Horace also authored the biography of Lacey Kirk Williams, a prominent Texas Baptist minister who became pastor of Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church in 1916, then the largest black church in the country. The biography, “Crowned with Glory and Honor”: The Life of Reverend Lacey Kirk Williams, was eventually published in 1978.

Women Across Texas History Series 3 Lillian Horace died on August 6, 1965, in Fort Worth. Her published and unpublished works stand as important literary contributions to the annals of African American Baptist and women’s history.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 4 Elizabeth Herndon Potter 2 By Ashley E. Miller

Elizabeth Herndon Potter, suffragist, clubwoman, and philanthropist, was born on January 19, 1871, in Tyler, Texas, to Col. William Smith Herndon (a lawyer, ex-Confederate, and U. S. congressman) and Mary Louise (McKellar) Herndon (a founding member of the Smith County Equal Franchise League and the Texas Woman’s Christian Temperance Union). She was given the nickname “Bessie” or “Bess” as a child. She had nine siblings; eight children lived to adulthood. She earned a degree from Elmyra College in New York. She also completed the normal course in cookery at Chautauqua, New York, and won a Elizabeth H. Potter, center. diploma entitling her to teach in agricultural Courtesy of Victor college. On June 3, 1891, she married John Edwin Texcucano. Potter, Jr., of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They had a daughter, Dorothy, in 1894 in Pennsylvania. The marriage ended in divorce, and by 1899 Potter and her daughter returned to her parents’ home in Tyler.

When Potter arrived back in Tyler, her mother was already active in the local First Literary Club, and Potter became active in their executive committee. She was also active in the Tyler Federation of Women’s Clubs and worked by leading the drive to bring to the city a Carnegie Library building (which stood as the Smith County Historical Society in 2016). By 1899 Potter was active in the woman’s movement and traveling to Dallas to learn more.

Women Across Texas History Series 5 As part of the revitalization efforts in 1913 of the Texas Woman Suffrage Association (renamed the Texas Equal Suffrage Association in 1916), Potter’s mother, Mary Louise Herndon, arranged to start the Smith County Equal Franchise League for the women of Tyler. Potter became a part of the publicity committee which helped her become active at the state and eventually the national level in the movement. Potter’s daughter Dorothy assisted her mother in hosting the important men and woman that met with Potter. Potter then became active in the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA) and took on the rank of vice president. As vice president she went on to represent the women of Texas as the congressional chairman for Texas in Washington, D. C. Potter corresponded frequently with TESA president Minnie Fisher Cunningham and with the public on the views in Washington on woman suffrage. She also worked with U. S. Senator Morris Sheppard, who supported woman suffrage and facilitated correspondence between Potter and President Woodrow Wilson. Through written correspondence with Potter, Wilson addressed the Texas legislature in 1918 and urged the state legislators to pass a state bill to provide Texas women the right to vote in political party primary elections. The Texas legislature passed the law in the spring of 1918, and Texas women cast their first ballots that year. After the suffrage movement succeeded in getting the Nineteenth Amendment of the United States passed in August 1920, Potter continued her public activities through a variety of volunteer activities and organizations. She remained active in the First Literary Club of Tyler, participated in the League of Women Voters of Texas, and wrote letters to the Dallas Morning News on her opinions against some of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies. Potter also donated a portion of Herndon family land and additional funds to the city of Tyler to build its YMCA building, thus earning the nickname “Godmother of the Tyler YMCA Building Site.” She became the last living child of William S. Herndon and lived to be ninety- five years old. She died on March 16, 1966, in Tyler and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery there.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 6 Minnie Fisher Cunningham 3 By Patricia Ellen Cunningham

Minnie Fisher Cunningham, woman suffrage leader and leading liberal Democrat, the daughter of Horatio White and Sallie Comer (Abercrombie) Fisher, was born on March 19, 1882, on Fisher Farms, near New Waverly, Texas. Her father was a prominent planter who served in the House of Representatives of the Seventh Texas Legislature in 1857–58. He introduced her to politics by taking her to political meetings at Cunningham after Huntsville. announcing her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. After having been educated by her August 05, 1927. Courtesy mother, Minnie passed a state examination to of Getty Images. earn a teaching certificate when she was sixteen. She taught for a year before enrolling in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In 1901 she became one of the first women to receive a degree in pharmacy in Texas; she worked as a pharmacist in Huntsville for a year, but she later said that inequity in pay "made a suffragette out of me." In 1902 she married Beverly Jean (Bill) Cunningham, a lawyer and insurance executive. His successful race for county attorney as a reform candidate was her first taste of the campaign trail, but the marriage was unhappy, in part because of her increasing political activity and his alcoholism. The Cunninghams moved to Galveston in 1907. By 1910 she was elected president of the Galveston Equal Suffrage Association and toured Texas to speak for the cause.

Women Across Texas History Series 7 In 1915, she was elected to the first of four annual terms as president of the Texas Woman Suffrage Association (subsequently the Texas Equal Suffrage Association). The number of local auxiliaries quadrupled during her first year in office, largely because of her leadership. In 1917 she moved to Austin, opened state suffrage headquarters near the Capitol, and began a campaign that culminated in legislative approval for woman suffrage in state primary elections in 1918.

In 1919, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, persuaded Minnie Cunningham to lobby Congress for the Nineteenth Amendment. When the amendment finally was passed and submitted to the states for ratification, Cunningham said she "pursued governors all over the west" and urged them to ratify it. That same year, she helped organize the National League of Women Voters and became its executive secretary. Twenty years later Eleanor Roosevelt recalled that Cunningham's address at the league's second annual convention made her feel "that you had no right to be a slacker as a citizen, you had no right not to take an active part in what was happening to your country as a whole." Minnie Cunningham was widowed in 1927, and traveled to Texas to settle her husband's estate. The following year she became the first Texas woman to run for the United States Senate.

She challenged Earle B. Mayfield, the incumbent, with a platform that advocated Image of Minnie Fisher prohibition, tariff reduction, tax reform, farm Cunningham. Courtesy of relief, flood control, cooperation with the League the Houston Chronicle. of Nations, and opposition to the Ku Klux Klan.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 8 She finished fifth of six in the primary, carrying only her home county, Walker. She then campaigned for Thomas T. Connally, the runner-up, who edged out Mayfield in the runoff.

From 1930 to 1939 Cunningham worked in College Station as an editor for the Texas A&M Extension Service. She returned to Washington in 1939, to work as an information specialist for the Women's Division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is credited with having given her the nickname by which she later became widely known, "Minnie Fish." She Minnie Fisher Cunningham resigned in 1943, to protest a rule Campaign Poster, 1928. Courtesy of the Jessie Daniel Ames impeding the flow of information to Papers, Texas State Library and farmers. Archives Commission.

In 1944, at the Democratic state convention, anti-Roosevelt forces elected "uninstructed’’ delegates to the national convention, effectively disenfranchising the voters of Texas. Outraged, Roosevelt supporters elected their own slate of delegates at a rump convention. When a coalition of liberal Democrats failed to draft J. Frank Dobie as a candidate for governor, Cunningham ran herself. Angry that the incumbent governor, Coke Stevenson, did not take a public stand on the split, she ran an outspoken campaign, calling on Stevenson to declare his views, and prevented his leading the anti-Roosevelt delegation to the national convention. Stevenson won the primary by a landslide. Nevertheless, in a field of nine candidates, Cunningham finished second.

Women Across Texas History Series 9 In 1946, she retired to Fisher Farms in New Waverly to raise cattle and pecans, but she continued to campaign for the Democratic party and organized ad hoc committees to support liberal causes. When the board of regents fired the president of the University of Texas, Homer P. Rainey, she opposed the regents' decision and supported Rainey's unsuccessful bid for the governorship.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education she supported civil rights on her local school board. In 1952, she stumped for Adlai Stevenson for president and Ralph Yarborough for governor. Prepared to mortgage her farm to ensure the continuation of a liberal voice in Texas journalism, she played a pivotal role in founding the Texas Observer in 1954. Also in the 1950s, she helped start Democrats of Texas, an organization of liberals. In 1960, at the age of seventy-eight, she managed the campaign headquarters for John F. Kennedy in New Waverly. Minnie Cunningham died on December 9, 1964, and was buried in New Waverly.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 10 Christia V. Daniels Adair 4 By Nancy Baker Jones

Christia Adair, black civil-rights activist and suffragist, was born on October 22, 1893, in Victoria, Texas, one of four children of Hardy and Ada (Crosby) Daniels. She attended a small school in Edna, then went to Austin with her brother in 1910 to attend high school at Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College). She later went to Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), then taught at Edna and later at Vanderbilt, Texas. In 1918 she married Elbert H. Adair, a brakeman for the Christia Adair by Judith Dedwick. Missouri Pacific Railroad. The couple Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library at moved to Kingsville, where Christia Harvard University. Adair started a Sunday school and joined a biracial group of women opposed to gambling. She also became one of the few black suffragists in the state. When she attempted to vote after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, however, she learned that state law concerning primary elections prevented her. Hurt that she could still be denied the vote, she began shifting her focus to racial issues. When presidential candidate Warren G. Harding appeared in Kingsville in 1920, she had carefully situated several black children close to Harding, but when he finished speaking he reached over them to shake the hands of white listeners behind them.

Women Across Texas History Series 11 "I was offended and insulted and I made up my mind I wouldn't be a Republican ever," she later recalled. The Adairs moved in 1925 to Houston, where Mrs. Adair became an early member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Elbert Adair died in 1943, and for the next sixteen years Christia Adair remained active in the NAACP, which she served as executive secretary for twelve years. The Houston branch brought suit against a local election judge in Smith v. Allwright for denying the vote to a local black dentist, Dr. Lonnie Smith. The case, argued by NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall, was decided in favor of Smith by the United States Supreme Court in 1944. Smith was important in the history of civil rights law because it ended the use of race as a barrier to voting in Texas Democratic primaries (see WHITE PRIMARY). This and similar NAACP activities made the chapter a target for its opponents. Bomb threats were not uncommon. Although Christia Adair was sometimes frightened and told people she kept a gun in her home, she was remembered by others as unafraid. In 1957, Houston police attempted for three weeks to locate the chapter's membership list. While the official charge was barratry—the illegal solicitation of clients by attorneys—Adair believed the real purpose was to destroy the organization and its advocacy of civil rights. She testified for five hours in a three-week trial over the attempted seizure of NAACP records. Two years later, on appeal to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall again won a decision for the organization. Adair never admitted having membership lists or having member's names. In 1959 the chapter disbanded and she resigned as executive secretary, though she later helped rebuild the group's rolls to 10,000 members. She also helped desegregate the Houston Public Library, airport, veterans' hospital, and city buses. Partly as a result of her work, blacks became able to serve on juries, and the city's newspapers began referring to blacks with the same titles they used for whites; blacks became able to be hired for county government jobs. Christia Adair successfully desegregated a department store's dressing rooms when she insisted on using a room reserved for white women only. With Frankie Randolph, she founded the Harris County Democrats, an integrated alternative to the county's segregated Democratic organization.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 12 She was precinct judge of the third ward, one of the first blacks in Houston to serve as a judge. In 1960 a Harris County grand jury investigated the records of an election in her ward, and the process embittered her. In 1966 she was one of the first two blacks elected to the state Democratic committee. In response, the state party refused to seat the Harris County delegation, then agreed to seat only its two black members. She refused the offer. Christia Adair was active in the Methodist Episcopal Church and was the first black woman elected to its general board. She was chairman of the Christian Social Concern program at Boynton United Methodist Church and served on its national board of missions. She was also active in the Texas Club, part of the National Association of Colored Women's and Girls' Club. She was one of fifty black women interviewed for an oral history of black women conducted by the Radcliffe College Schlesinger Library of History of Women in America, and in 1974 the Houston chapter of the National Organization for Women honored her for suffrage activism. She worked as a county clerk of absentee voting when she was well into her eighties. On her eighty-fourth birthday a county park in Houston was dedicated in her name. Christia Adair died on December 31, 1989.

Christia Adair Park in Houston, TX. Courtesy of Harris County Precinct 1 Parks.

Women Across Texas History Series 13 Jessie Harriet Daniel Ames 5 By Jon D. Swartz

Jessie Ames, suffragist and antilynching reformer, daughter of James Malcolm and Laura Maria (Leonard) Daniel, was born in Palestine, Texas, on November 2, 1883. In 1893 the family moved to Georgetown where Jessie entered the Ladies Annex of Southwestern University at the age of thirteen. She graduated with a B.A. degree in 1902 and moved with her family to Laredo. There in June 1905 she married Roger Post Ames, an army surgeon and friend of her father. They had a son and two daughters, the last born in 1914, the year Roger Ames died in Guatemala of blackwater fever. Jessie Harriet Daniel Ames. Courtesy of Because her marriage was an unhappy one, she and Women in Texas her husband lived apart; he was a doctor in Central History. America while she and the children lived with her parents and older sister. After the death of her father in 1911, Jessie Ames helped her mother run their Georgetown telephone company. In 1916 she organized and became the first president of the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League and began to write a weekly "Woman Suffrage Notes" column for the Williamson County Sun. As the protégée of Minnie Fisher Cunningham, president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, Jessie Ames was elected treasurer of the state association in 1918; from this position she helped to make Texas the first southern state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1919, she became the founder and first president of the state League of Women Voters; she represented the national League of Women Voters at the Pan American Congress in 1923. She served as a delegate-at-large to the

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 14 national Democratic party conventions of 1920 and 1924 and as an alternate delegate in 1928. She also was president of the Texas branch of the American Association of University Women and an officer of the Women's Joint Legislative Council, the Board of Education (Women's Division) of the Methodist Church, the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, and the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs. In 1924 she became director of the Texas Council of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), based in Atlanta. In 1929 she moved to Atlanta to become the national director of the CIC Woman's Committee; a year later, financed primarily by the CIC, she founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a group of white women organized to fight racial violence and vigilante executions. By February 1937 eighty-one state, regional, and national organizations or groups had endorsed the anti-lynching platform. Jessie Ames directed the Association of Southern Women until 1942, when the CIC was replaced by the Southern Regional Council. She retired to Tryon, North Carolina, then returned in October 1968 to Texas to live with her younger daughter. The next year she presented the family library of some 1,200 books to the Cody Memorial Library of Jessie Daniel Ames Historical Marker. Courtesy of Southwestern University. the Williamson County Historical Commission. She died in Austin of pneumonia on February 21, 1972, and is buried in the family plot in the I.O.O.F. Cemetery in Georgetown. In 1985 the Jessie Daniel Ames Lecture Series was inaugurated at Southwestern University, and Jessie Ames's life and work were the subject of both the university's 1985 Freshman Symposium and its 1986 Brown Symposium.

Women Across Texas History Series 15 Annie Webb Blanton 6 By Debbie Mauldin Cottrell

Annie Webb Blanton, teacher, suffragist, and the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office, was born on August 19, 1870, in Houston, one of seven children of Thomas Lindsay and Eugenia (Webb) Blanton. Her twin sister, Fannie, died as a girl. A brother, Thomas Lindsay Blanton, represented central West Texas in the United States Congress from 1917 to 1936. Annie Blanton attended school in Houston and La Grange. After graduating from La Grange High School in 1886, she taught in a rural school in Fayette County. After her father's death in 1888, she moved to Austin, where she taught in both elementary and secondary schools. She supported herself by Annie Webb Blanton, teaching while studying at the University of Texas, North Texas State where she graduated in 1899. Normal College Faculty, 1905. Courtesy of the From 1901 to 1918, Blanton served on the English Austin History Center. faculty of North Texas State Normal College (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, where she became active in the Texas State Teachers Association. Because she established herself as a strong believer in equal rights for women and also was known for having written a series of grammar textbooks, she was elected president of the association in 1916. She was the first woman to hold this position.

In 1917 Texas suffragists found a sympathetic leader in Gov. William P. Hobby, after the impeachment of Gov. James Ferguson.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 16 In Hobby's first called legislative session in February 1918 women obtained the right to vote in Texas primaries. The suffragists offered their support to Hobby in his 1918 bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and asked Annie Blanton to run for state superintendent of public instruction. In a bitter campaign, she was accused of being an atheist and of running as a tool for others, but she fought back and charged the incumbent with close associations with the impeached former governor and the breweries. In the July 1918 primary, when Texas women exercised their voting rights for the first time, Blanton defeated incumbent Walter F. Doughty and Brandon Trussell by a large margin. Her victory in the general election in November made her the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office.

During her tenure as state superintendent a system of free textbooks was established, teacher certification laws were revised, teachers' salaries were raised, and efforts were made to improve rural education. Blanton was reelected in November 1920, when voters also passed the Better Schools Amendment, which she had proposed as a means of removing constitutional limitations on tax rates for local school districts. She served as state superintendent through 1922, when she did not seek a third term but ran unsuccessfully for the United States Congress from Denton County. She Dr. Annie Webb subsequently returned to the University of Blanton. Courtesy of Texas, where she received her master's degree Texas Women’s in 1923. She taught in the UT education University Library. department until 1926, then took a leave of absence to earn her Ph.D. from Cornell University. After returning to the University of Texas in 1927, she remained a professor of education there for the rest of her life.

Women Across Texas History Series 17 Blanton published several books during her career, including Review Outline and Exercises in English Grammar (1903), A Handbook of Information as to Education in Texas (1922), Advanced English Grammar (1928), and The Child of the Texas One-Teacher School (1936). In 1929 she founded the Delta Kappa Gamma Society, an honorary society for women teachers, which in 1988 had an international membership of 162,000. She also was active in national educational groups and served as a vice president in the National Education Association in 1917, 1919, and 1921. Throughout her career she was especially interested in the needs of rural schools.

Blanton, who never married, was a Methodist. She died in Austin on October 2, 1945, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Public schools are named for her in Austin, Dallas, and Odessa, and a women's dormitory at the University of Texas at Austin bears her name.

Annie Webb Blanton Historical Marker.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 18 Anna J. H. Pennybacker 7 By Stacy A. Cordery

Anna J. Hardwicke Pennybacker, clubwoman, woman suffrage advocate, author, and lecturer, daughter of John Benjamin and Martha (Dews) Hardwicke, was born on May 7, 1861, in Petersburg, Virginia. As a high school student she substituted the unexplained initial J for her second given name, McLaughlin. She graduated from the first class of Sam Houston Normal School in Huntsville, continued her education in Europe, and subsequently taught grammar and high school for fourteen years, including some sessions at the Chautauqua Summer Assembly. In 1884, she married native Texan Percy V. Pennybacker (who died in 1899); they had three children who reached adulthood. Mrs. Pennybacker wrote and published Anna J. H. Pennybacker. Courtesy of the General A New History of Texas in 1888, and the textbook Federation of Women’s was a staple of Texas classrooms for forty years. Clubs. Active since 1892 in women's clubs, Mrs. Pennybacker founded one of the first in Texas, the Tyler Woman's Club, in 1894.

In 1901 she presided over the Austin American History Club. She went on to serve as president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs from 1901 to 1903, a position in which she raised $3,500 for women's scholarships at the University of Texas and helped persuade the legislature to fund a women's dormitory there. Additionally, under her leadership the federation began a traveling library and art collection that resulted in the establishment of many

Women Across Texas History Series 19 permanent libraries in Texas. Mrs. Pennybacker was treasurer of the General Federation of Women's Clubs from 1904 to 1906 and auditor from 1906 to 1908. She chaired the endowment committee of the same organization in 1911–12 and finally served two terms as president of the federation (1912– 16). She was chairman of the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Women Voters in 1920, and of the American Citizenship Department of the General Federation of Women's Clubs from 1920 to 1924. She was a trustee of the Leslie Woman's Suffrage Committee as early as 1917. She was a principal influence behind the Chautauqua, New York, Women's Club, and was its president from 1917 to 1938. She staved off bankruptcy at Chautauqua in 1935 by persuading John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to match Chautauqua's fund drive with a $15,185 contribution. In 1936 she also got President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to speak at the Chautauqua Institute's summer camp, thus helping to raise another $13,000.

Mrs. Pennybacker was an associate member of the Democratic National Committee (1919–1920) and through her work with the Democrats met Eleanor Roosevelt in 1924. Their fourteen-year friendship was based on mutual interests in the advancement of women, world peace, and the Democratic party. As an unofficial political analyst for the Roosevelt campaigns, Anna Pennybacker reported to campaign officials the political leanings of many prominent southwesterners.

During World War I she was Anna Pennybacker (left) with Eleanor Roosevelt (center) and Dr. Harry Estill in active in the Food 1837. Courtesy of the Sam Houston State Administration of Texas and in University Archives. 1934 on the Texas Centennial Commission.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 20 In 1937 she became the first woman in the history of Houston to give the commencement speech to the city's combined high schools. She traveled the country lecturing on topics such as the status of women and immigrants, Near East relief, the activities of the World Court and the League of Nations (in which she participated as a special correspondent in 1925, 1926, 1927, 1929, and 1931), and her frequent visits to the White House. She was an Episcopalian. At the time of her death in Austin, on February 4, 1938, Mrs. Pennybacker was highly regarded nationwide for her social conscience and reforms.

Women Across Texas History Series 21 Jane L. Y. McCallum 8 By Roberta S. Duncan

Jane McCallum, suffragist leader and Texas secretary of state, was born to Alvaro Leonard and Mary Fullerton (LeGette) Yelvington in La Vernia, Texas, on December 30, 1877. Yelvington was a pioneer sheriff of Wilson County in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Jane attended schools in Wilson County and Dr. Zealey's Female College in Mississippi in 1892–93. She studied at the University of Texas from 1912 to 1915 and in 1923–24 but never received a degree. On October 29, 1896, she married Arthur Newell McCallum, Sr., a North Carolina native who had ventured to Texas in 1895. She moved with him from La Vernia to Kenedy, then Seguin, and finally Austin, where he served as school Jane Legette Yelvington McCallum. Courtesy of superintendent from 1903 to 1942. The Humanities Texas. couple had a daughter and four sons. Jane McCallum first entered politics by campaigning for prohibition and woman suffrage. On October 22, 1915, the Austin Women's Suffrage Association elected her president.

She also teamed with Minnie Fisher Cunningham, president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, in leading statewide campaigns for suffrage; she served as state manager of press and publicity for the state constitutional amendment on full suffrage and state chairman of the

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 22 ratification committee for the federal, or nineteenth, amendment. To further promote suffrage, Jane McCallum delivered public speeches and wrote a suffrage column that appeared in the Austin American and later the Austin Statesman (see AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN). During World War I, as women's chairman of the fourth Liberty Loan Drive, she led Austin women in raising nearly $700,000 for the war effort.

After suffrage was won she concentrated on political reforms. She was state publicity chairman for the Education ("Better Schools") Amendment to the Texas Constitution, approved in November 1920. She also headed publicity efforts for the League of Women Voters of Texas and served a term as first vice president. From 1923 to 1925 she served as executive secretary of the Women's Joint Legislative Council, a coalition of six statewide women's organizations that lobbied for education bills, prison reform, stronger prohibition controls, maternal and child health funds, and eradication of illiteracy and child labor. Known as the "Petticoat Lobby," the coalition became an important lobbying group of the era. Jane McCallum was also a member of the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor. In 1926 she led the Petticoat Lobbyists in campaigning for Daniel J. Moody's gubernatorial bid against Miriam A. Ferguson. Moody appointed her secretary of state in January 1927, and she retained the position under Governor Ross Sterling from 1931 to 1933; she was thus the only person in Texas to hold the position under two governors and for more than two terms. Shortly after assuming office in 1927, she discovered in a vault in the state Capitol an original copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence. She considered her role in restoring and displaying the document to be one of her important contributions to the state.

McCallum served as a presidential elector in 1940 and as a state Democratic committeewoman for the Twentieth Senatorial District in 1942 and again for the Tenth United States Congressional District in 1944. She also remained active in civic affairs throughout her life. In 1944 she was appointed to the first Austin city planning commission; in January 1945 she led the Women's Committee on Educational Freedom into the Capitol to protest the firing of

Women Across Texas History Series 23 University of Texas president Homer P. Rainey; and in 1954 she became the first woman grand jury commissioner in Travis County.

Her writings concentrated on women's issues and women leaders. Her suffrage column, "Woman and Her Ways," evolved into a Sunday feature on women's issues that appeared at intervals in the Austin American-Statesman until the late 1940s. She chronicled the history of the Texas suffrage movement for History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922). She profiled the sculptor Elisabet Ney for the University of Texas literary publication, Texas Magazine, and for Holland's Magazine. Her collection of biographical sketches of early American leaders, Women Pioneers, was published in 1929, while she was serving as secretary of state. During the 1950s Texas Parade published some of her works,

The Arthur N. and Jane Y. McCallum House in Austin. Courtesy of Humanities Texas. including a few excerpts from her unpublished manuscript, "All Texans Were Not Males." In private life she participated in numerous organizations, including the Texas Fine Arts Association, the American Association of University Women, the Colonial Dames of America, the League of Women Voters, the Austin Shakespeare Club, and the Austin

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 24 Woman's Club. She was the first married woman at the University of Texas to join a sorority, Alpha Delta Pi. Although reared as an Episcopalian, in Austin she attended the First Southern Presbyterian Church, where her husband served as an elder. On August 14, 1957, Jane McCallum died. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Austin.

Women Across Texas History Series 25 Sara Isadora S. Callaway 9 By Megan Seaholm

Sara Isadora Callaway [pseud. Pauline Periwinkle],journalist, suffragist, clubwoman, and community activist, was born in Michigan on September 25, 1863, the daughter of a Civil War soldier and a suffragist. She began writing at age twelve and later worked as a journalist and writer in Michigan and Ohio. She married James Weston Minor (Miner) in 1884 and published two books of children's stories and verse in 1890. After her husband died she moved to Dallas, Texas, to be near her mother and stepfather. She began working at the Dallas Morning News in Sara Isadora Sutherland January 1893, as society editor and editor Callaway. of the women's page, and for more than twenty years she wrote a popular weekly column under the pen name Pauline Periwinkle. Later she wrote and edited a weekly children's page in the News. She was also editor of the Semi-Weekly Farm News, published in both Dallas and Galveston. In July 1900, she married William Allen Callaway, an insurance agent and former newspaperman. As a witty and sometimes acerbic journalist, Mrs. Callaway inaugurated or advocated several successful social and public health crusades. In 1903 and 1904 she wrote several columns urging the establishment of a juvenile court system and a home for juvenile offenders. She initiated a campaign for pure drinking water and a movement for an antiexpectoration ordinance

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 26 and wrote in favor of a pure-food law. She also promoted women's rights and women's organizations in her columns.

She organized the first woman suffrage club in Dallas in 1894. She was a founding member of the Texas Women's Press Association in 1893 and helped organize the Woman's Congress, later the State Council of Women of Texas, in 1893. Among the many women who spoke before the council was sculptor Elisabet Ney. Through the State Council, Isadore Callaway fostered the establishment of the Women's Building at the State Fair of Texas. She was president of the Oak Cliff Quero Club and an honorary member of the Dallas Pierian Club. She served as seventh president of the Dallas City Federation of Women's Clubs in 1907 and 1908 and was a founding member of the Dallas Woman's Forum in 1906. While president of the Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs, she led the movement for supervised playgrounds for boys and for the employment of a police matron and a woman probation officer. She originated the annual Christmas empty- stocking crusade for poor children and helped organize the Dallas Free Kindergarten Association. She was a charter member of the Dallas Humane Society and the Jane Douglas chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a director of the Dallas Public Library, and the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce city-beautification committee. As an original member of the Rural Welfare Association, begun in 1913, Mrs. Callaway encouraged the establishment of the Dallas County Rest Room for country women. Child welfare expert Henry S. Curtis ranked her as one of four outstanding American women, along with Jane Addams, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The Callaways lived in Dallas and raised two orphaned nieces. Isadore Callaway died on August 10, 1916, at St. Paul's Sanitarium in Dallas.

Women Across Texas History Series 27 Jovita Idár 10 By Nancy Baker Jones

Jovita Idár, teacher, journalist, and political activist, was born in Laredo in 1885, one of eight children of Jovita and Nicasio Idár. She attended the Holding Institute (a Methodist school) in Laredo, from which she earned a teaching certificate in 1903. She then taught at a small school in Ojuelos. Inadequate equipment and poor conditions, as well as her inability to improve them, frustrated her, so she resigned and joined two of her brothers as writers for her father's weekly newspaper, La Crónica. Jovita Idár. In 1910 and 1911, La Crónica was vocal in criticizing certain aspects of Hispanic-Anglo relations. It featured stories on educational and social discrimination against Mexican-Americans, deteriorating economic conditions, decreasing use of the Spanish language, the loss of Mexican culture, and lynchings of Hispanics. The newspaper also supported efforts of the revolutionary forces in Mexico. In 1911 La Crónica called a convention of the Orden Caballeros de Honor, a fraternal order, to discuss the troubling issues of the times. In September 1911 Jovita Idár joined lodge members and others at Laredo in the First Mexican Congress to discuss educational, social, labor, and economic matters. Women participated as speakers and participants; for some it was the first political meeting. This congress has been called the first attempt in Mexican-American history to organize a militant feminist social movement. That same year, Idár published a pro-woman suffrage piece

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 28 in La Crónica. In 1916, when she and her brother, Eduardo, formed another newspaper entitled Evolución, they continued to advocate publicly through their press the importance of women's rights in politics. Another outcome of the congress was the formation in October 1911 of the League of Mexican Women. Jovita Idár became its first president and organized its principal effort, to provide education for poor children.

In 1913, during the Mexican Revolution battle of Nuevo Laredo, Idár and a friend, Leonor Villegas de Magnon, crossed the border to care for the injured. Idár later joined La Cruz Blanca, a medical group similar to the Red Cross, and traveled in northern Mexico with revolutionary forces as a nurse. When she returned to Laredo later that year she joined the staff of the newspaper El Progreso and soon offended the United States Army and Texas Rangers with an editorial protesting President Woodrow Wilson's dispatch of United States troops to the border. When rangers arrived to close down El Progreso, Idár stood in the doorway to keep them from entering. The rangers Jovita Idár (far right) and Leonor Villegas closed the newspaper later, however, de Magnón (far left) at Saucito Pantheon and Idár returned to La Crónica. Cemetery, San Luis Potosi. Courtesy of After her father died in 1914, she ran the University of Houston Digital Library. the paper.

In 1917, Idár married Bartolo Juárez. The couple moved to San Antonio, where Jovita Juárez became an active member of the Democratic Party, established a free kindergarten, worked as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients in a county hospital, and was an editor of El Heraldo Christiano, a publication of the Rio Grande Conference of the Methodist Church. She and her husband had no children. She died in San Antonio in 1946.

Women Across Texas History Series 29 Clara Driscoll 11 By Dorothy D. DeMoss

Clara Driscoll, businesswoman, philanthropist, and historic preservationist, was born on April 2, 1881, to Robert and Julia (Fox) Driscoll in St. Mary's, Texas, near the site of present Bayside. Her ancestors were among the Irish Catholic pioneers who had settled the area between the Nueces and Guadalupe rivers, and both of her grandfathers had fought in the Texas Revolution. By 1890 her father had amassed a multimillion-dollar empire in ranching, banking, and commercial developments centered in the Corpus Christi area. For her education he sent his only daughter to private schools in Texas, New York City, and France. Clara Driscoll, 1903. After almost a decade of study and travel abroad, Courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American Clara Driscoll returned to Texas at the age of History. eighteen, imbued with an appreciation of the importance of preserving historic sites in Texas for the benefit of future generations. She was shocked to discover the disrepair of the three-acre plaza and barracks area adjoining San Antonio de Valero Mission, familiarly called the Alamo, and to learn that the property might soon be converted into a hotel. From 1903 to 1905 she worked with the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to acquire and preserve the Alamo by personally paying most of the purchase price. The attractive young philanthropist received extensive national publicity as the "Savior of the Alamo."

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 30 She then pursued a writing career. She wrote a novel, The Girl of La Gloria (1905), a collection of short stories, In the Shadow of the Alamo (1906), and a comic opera, Mexicana, the production of which she financed on Broadway in 1906. That same year she married Henry Hulme (Hal) Sevier at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. The Seviers, who had met several years earlier in Austin, when Sevier was serving in the Texas legislature, remained in New York. Hal served as financial editor of the New York Sun, and Clara served as the president of the Texas Club and entertained extensively at their opulent villa on Long Island.

After Clara Sevier's father died in 1914, the Seviers returned to Austin to be near her family's financial interests. Sevier established a daily newspaper, the Austin American (see AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN ), and his wife became active in the Austin Garden Club and Pan American Round Table and served as president of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. She also directed construction of Laguna Gloria, a fine Italianate mansion located on the Colorado River near the city.

At the death of her brother, Robert Driscoll, Jr., in 1929, Mrs. Sevier closed Laguna Gloria and moved with her husband to her family's Palo Alto ranch headquarters to manage extensive land and petroleum properties and to serve as president of the Corpus Christi Bank and Trust Company. Under her astute leadership the financial dominion almost doubled in value. After a two- year residence in Santiago, Chile, while her husband served as the United States ambassador there, the Seviers returned to Texas in 1935 and shortly thereafter legally separated. When the childless, thirty-one-year marriage was dissolved, Clara legally resumed her maiden name and was thereafter officially known as Mrs. Clara Driscoll.

During the next decade much of her time, energy, and money were devoted to historic preservation, civic betterment, and club activity. She assisted the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs in liquidating the mortgage on its Austin clubhouse, served as vice chairman of the Texas Centennial Exposition executive board, and presented Laguna Gloria to the Texas Fine Arts

Women Across Texas History Series 31 Association to be used as a museum (see LAGUNA GLORIA ART MUSEUM). To memorialize her brother and to improve the economic life of Corpus Christi, she constructed the lavish twenty-story Hotel Robert Driscoll, where she occupied the large penthouse apartment. Colorful, outspoken, and independent-minded, Driscoll relished participation in the political arena. She was elected the Democratic party's national committeewoman from Texas in 1922 and served in that position for an unprecedented sixteen years. In 1939 she promoted the candidacy of her friend John Nance Garner for president. After Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected for a third term, however, she remained loyal to what she considered the best interests of her party and supported Roosevelt's fourth- term efforts during a bitter battle at the 1944 state convention. Her political acumen and activity were acknowledged to be of national importance, and it was said that "political potentates and Texas voters knew her equally well."

Photograph, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas at Laguna Gloria, ca. 1916-1929. Clara Driscoll is standing in the front row near the center with her dress draped at the hips. Courtesy of Humanities Texas.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 32 Clara Driscoll was a Catholic. She died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 17, 1945, in Corpus Christi. After her body had lain in state at the Alamo chapel, she was interred at the Masonic Cemetery in San Antonio. She bequeathed the bulk of her family fortune to establish the Driscoll Foundation Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi.

Women Across Texas History Series 33 Adina Emilia de Zavala 12 By L. Robert Ables

Adina Emilia De Zavala, preservationist, eldest of six children of Augustine and Julia (Tyrrell) De Zavala and granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, was born on November 28, 1861, in Harris County. She and her parents used De as the beginning of their surname. The family lived at Galveston before moving to a ranch near San Antonio about 1873. The young Adina attended Ursuline Academy at Galveston from 1871 to 1873, was enrolled at Sam Houston Normal Institute at Huntsville in 1879, from which she graduated in 1881, and later attended a school of music in Missouri. She taught school at Terrell from 1884 to 1886 and later in San Antonio. About 1889 she and other Adina Emilia de Zavala. San Antonio women met to discuss Texas and Courtesy of Texas Tejano. its heroes; this group became one of the first societies composed of women organized for patriotic purposes in the state. In 1893 members of this society became affiliated with the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. One of Miss Zavala's greatest contributions to Texas was the preservation of a portion of the old San Antonio de Valero Mission, better known as the Alamo, which her group prevented from being razed in the early twentieth century. The state had purchased the chapel of the Alamo from the Catholic Church in 1883, but in 1886 Hugo and Schmeltzer Company, a wholesale grocery firm, bought the Alamo mission convent, also known as the monastery, long barracks, or fortress, which was the scene of the major resistance by Alamo defenders against the Mexican forces headed by Antonio López de Santa

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 34 Anna in 1836. As early as 1892, before her historical group affiliated with the DRT, Adina De Zavala extracted a verbal promise from the grocery firm to give her chapter first chance at buying the property.

Clara Driscoll joined the society and the DRT in 1903, and the next year she purchased the Hugo and Schmeltzer Company property to prevent an "eastern syndicate" from acquiring it. The Texas legislature authorized state purchase of the property from Miss Driscoll in January 1905 and gave custody of the Alamo to the DRT, but soon the women began to disagree upon procedures for preservation of the Alamo and upon exactly what constituted the Alamo at the time of its siege and fall in 1836. The women split into two factions, one led by Adina De Zavala and the other by Clara Driscoll, and fought for control of the state organization of the DRT and the Alamo. Certain legal aspects of the battle were settled by state courts, which in a series of decisions ruled in favor of the Driscoll group as the de jure DRT in 1909. While Clara Driscoll and others in the DRT expressed Adina De Zavala (center behind group) and students at the desires to Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Courtesy of the Briscoe Center destroy the for American History. dilapidated Hugo and Schmeltzer building in the mistaken belief that it was erected after the 1836 battle, Adina De Zavala led the opposition in a resolute and

Women Across Texas History Series 35 voluble stand against any such move and was instrumental in the preservation of portions of the original wall of the convent.

In fact, she barricaded herself inside the north barrack of the Alamo for three days in February 1908 to protest its destruction. She believed that this section of the mission had more historical value than the Alamo chapel. She and the DRT renewed the feud over historical questions revolving around the Alamo at intervals, and time has proved that Adina De Zavala was correct in most of her historical contentions concerning the mission.

In 1912, she organized the Texas Historical and Landmarks Association, which placed thirty-eight markers at historic sites in Texas. She probably did more than any other one person in stirring interest in the preservation of the Spanish Governor's Palace in San Antonio, which was finally purchased in 1928, by the city and restored. In the 1930s, she helped establish the location near Crockett of sites of the first two missions established in Texas by the Spanish. In 1923, Governor Pat Neff appointed her to the Texas Historical Board, and she was one of the original members of the Committee of One Hundred appointed to plan for a state centennial. She also served on the advisory board of the Texas Centennial Committee. She was a charter member of the Adina De Zavala Historical Marker. Texas State Historical Association

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 36 and a member of the executive council of that body beginning in 1919. In 1945, she was elected an honorary life fellow of the association.

De Zavala was a dedicated Catholic and a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Texas Folklore Society, the Philosophical Society of Texas, the Texas Woman's Press Association, and many other organizations. She was the author of a book, History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and Around San Antonio (1917) pamphlets, including The Story of the Siege and Fall of the Alamo: A Résumé (1911); and a contributor to the Handbook of Texas (1952). Adina De Zavala died on March 1, 1955, and was buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in San Antonio.

Women Across Texas History Series 37 Drusilla E. Tandy Nixon 13 By Will Guzmán

Drusilla E. Tandy Nixon, community activist, clubwoman, and music educator, was born on July 15, 1899, in Toledo, Ohio. She was the daughter of Maud (Grant) Tandy and John Clifford Tandy. Drusilla, wife of physician and civil rights activist Lawrence Aaron Nixon, was fearless in breaking away from the conventional norms of her day. From the time she graduated from Toledo’s predominately-white Waite High School in 1917, to the year she married Lawrence in 1935, Drusilla lived in ten cities, including San Antonio and El Paso.The well-traveled Nixon married three times to older, prominent, and politically-conscious Drusilla Elizabeth Tandy Nixon, ca middle-class African-American men. 1920s. Courtesy of the Edna At Waite High School, Nixon was the only Angela (Nixon) McIver Family Collection. black student in her class and sought every opportunity to prove herself as a leader who was just as capable as her classmates. She wrote for the school magazine, was elected class novelist, and became the orchestra’s violinist and concertmaster. Nixon’s musical talents allowed her to win first place in a national contest for composers. Upon graduation, Drusilla attended the University of Toledo before the school closed due to the 1918 worldwide influenza outbreak. Drusilla was then offered a job with the American Missionary Association in Georgia and was assigned to the elitist First Congregational Church in Atlanta, the

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 38 largest black congregational church in the state. By January 1920 she resided with her Toledo family while employed as a shipping clerk for a local electrical shop.

In November 1920, Nixon moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and married Webster L. Porter, an attorney and East Tennessee News owner–editor. The Kansas City Advocate wrote that Tandy was “one of the most refined, cultured educated young women,” and Porter “won her heart when she was doing social service work in Raleigh, N.C., but he met her in Atlanta, Ga., where she was also doing some work.” In February 1922, Drusilla gave birth to her first daughter, Dorothy M. L. Porter. Soon thereafter Nixon filed for divorce and accused Porter of battering her during the pregnancy. She moved back with Dorothy to Toledo in 1922.

It is not known when Drusilla moved from Toledo to Philadelphia or when she married and separated from Ernest Ten Eyck Attwell. Between 1907 and 1915, Attwell served in a variety of roles while at Tuskegee Institute, including assistant to Booker T. Washington’s private secretary, Emmett Jay Scott. Nixon formally filed for divorce from Attwell in Ciudad Juárez, México, on November 5, 1935. Days later, on November 14, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, she married Lawrence Nixon. Drusilla first moved to El Paso for eighteen months in October 1929 to alleviate her severe chronic asthma. Dr. Nixon, who challenged the Dr. L. A. Nixon and Drusilla Nixon, Democratic party’s white primary in ca 1930s. Courtesy of the family of Texas between 1924 and 1944, was Mrs. Edna Angela (Nixon) McIver. Courtesy of the Edna Angela (Nixon) Drusilla’s physician during her initial McIver Family Collection.

Women Across Texas History Series 39 tenure in El Paso. In April 1937 Drusilla gave birth to her second daughter, Drusilla Ann Nixon, who was born with Down Syndrome. In January 1939 Lawrence and Drusilla had their second child—Edna Angela Nixon.

In El Paso, Drusilla Nixon served her community by being active in the black women’s club movement, which was committed to uplifting the black community through the collective efforts of women. In 1935 she organized the Black Girl Reserves, emphasizing service, spirit, health, and knowledge. For more than forty years, Nixon was a member of the Phyllis Wheatley Club and at one time served as club president. She opened her home to black servicemen in 1941, which led to the establishment of an El Paso United Service Organization. Nixon was the first black woman to serve on the El Paso YWCA board and as delegate to their 1955 Centennial Celebration in New York City. She also became vice-president of the Church Women United, a member of the El Paso Mental Health Board, and the El Paso Council of Churches. Additionally, she served as St. James Myrtle United Methodist Church choir director and was active in their United Methodist Women. Moreover, in her service to youth, at the request of the mayor’s committee, Nixon co-chaired the El Paso Parks and Recreation Department. Another of her endearing and far-reaching gifts was teaching music to children. Her best-known student was Barbara Jean Tutt Lee, California’s Ninth Congressional District U.S. Congresswoman, whom Nixon instructed in music and piano lessons.

In 1945, Nixon became a charter member of the El Paso chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). This group shared Nixon’s political views and beliefs: a commitment to multiracial coalition- building to address institutional racism, economic disparity, and political exclusion. Nixon served on the SCHW’s executive committee and helped promote its progressive agenda, participated in group meetings, became active in voter registration drives, lobbied for the abolition of the poll tax, led group discussions on educational reform, publicized the effects of segregation and discrimination in the South, prevented the unjust

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 40 deportation of labor activist Humberto Silex, and organized the visits of guest speakers such as Idaho Senator Glen H. Taylor.

Nixon was part of a national association whose leadership consisted of prominent activists such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Virginia Durr, Aubrey Williams, Lillian Smith, Lucy Randolph Mason, Walter White, Frank P. Graham, and James A. Dombrowski. Unfortunately, in June 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee deemed the national SCHW a “deviously camouflaged Communists-front organization.” These false allegations prompted the El Paso SCHW to cease operating in 1948.

Nevertheless, Nixon remained engaged in local affairs and the fight for civil rights, including supporting the city’s formal integration by way of the 1962 El Paso City Ordinance. In the early 1960s, El Paso integrationists formed an ad-hoc council, which included Nixon, that later became the Citizens’ Committee on Human Relations. They successfully demanded that the city approve Ordinance 2698 on June 21, 1962, which applied to restaurants, hotels and motels, and to places of public entertainment. The national press asserted that El Paso “became the first entirely integrated city in Texas, the first in all the South and Southwest to come to terms with the most divisive issue of the republic.”

During all her activism, Nixon remained elegantly soft-spoken, but firm, not hesitant in speaking forcefully when needed. One El Pasoan recalled that “her husband was very quiet, and she was the agitator in the family.” Nixon died on May 10, 1990, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The El Paso Commission for Women inducted Nixon posthumously as an honorary member of the El Paso Hall of Fame. Nixon left an indelible mark on the people and communities she encountered.

Women Across Texas History Series 41 Portia M. Washington Pittman 14 By Peggy Hardman

Portia Washington Pittman, musician and teacher, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on June 6, 1883, the only daughter of Booker T. and Fanny (Smith) Washington. Her father was the founder of Tuskegee Institute. Upon her mother's death in 1884, Portia's care came from nursemaids and two stepmothers. Already a fairly accomplished pianist by the age of ten, she entertained her family by playing spirituals and simple classical pieces. Her father arranged for her to attend New England's finest boarding schools, including Framingham State Normal School in Massachusetts in 1895. After grammar school she returned home to take classes at Tuskegee Institute, and in 1901 she Attended Wellesley College in Portia Marshall Washington Pittman. Massachusetts. In New England she continued her piano studies and received a degree from the Bradford Academy (now Bradford Junior College) in 1905, the first African American to obtain a degree from that institution. Upon graduation Portia traveled to Berlin to study under Martin Krause, master pianist and former student of Franz Liszt. Complicating her time in Europe, however, were the persistent attentions of William Sidney Pittman, a Tuskegee student and teacher she had met in 1900. Now, five years later, Pittman determined to marry Portia and persuaded her through a passionate

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 42 correspondence. Portia sacrificed her piano studies, returned to the United States, and married Sidney Pittman on Halloween, 1907, in the chapel of Tuskegee Institute. Pittman decided that he and Portia should begin afresh in Washington, D.C. There he set up an architectural practice and built their home in Fairmont Heights, Maryland. Between 1908 and 1912 Portia gave birth to her three children. Nevertheless she made her concert debut in a joint recital with Clarence Cameron White in May 1908 in Washington, and periodically toured on a concert circuit. Despite family happiness, money problems plagued the Pittman's. Sidney's architectural contracts dried up, and Portia began giving private piano lessons in order to maintain the family income.

Pittman's vanity was wounded by his wife's having to work as well as by her family's fame. He moved the family in 1913, to Dallas, where he thought Booker T. Washington's shadow would be less oppressive. They settled on Juliette Street. After Pittman's contracts again dropped off, partly because Dallas blacks who could afford his services preferred to hire white architects, financial difficulties again plagued Portia's life. On November 14, 1915, her father died. A fire in 1918, destroyed the Pittman’s second Dallas home on Germania Street, and they moved to Liberty Street. Improvement in the family's fortunes began at this time, however, and continued for nearly ten years. Pittman became the president of the Brotherhood of Negro Building Mechanics of Texas, and Portia began teaching music at Booker T. Washington High School in 1925. She also chaired the education department of the Texas Association of Negro Musicians. In March 1927 the National Education Association held its annual convention in Dallas. Almost 7,500 teachers attended. A 600-voice choir from Booker T. Washington High School, under Portia's direction, sang a medley of popular and spiritual songs. It was the first time in history that a black high school group had appeared on the NEA program. Tremendous applause and cries of "encore" rose after the performance, and a spontaneous sing-along erupted as audience and choir together sang spirituals and folk songs.

Women Across Texas History Series 43 NEA president Randall J. Condon, a Los Angeles principal, judged the performance a "complete success." Later that summer Portia traveled to Columbia University in order to acquire academic credentials to allow her to continue teaching in the Dallas public schools. In 1928, a violent quarrel between Pittman and his daughter, Fannie, culminated in his striking the girl. Portia packed, took Fannie, and left Pittman and Texas. She began teaching at Tuskegee that same year. Her classes included piano, public school music, glee club, and choir. Tuskegee had changed, however, since her father s death. The new administration demanded that all faculty members have academic degrees in order to teach. Lacking such credentials, Portia was removed from the faculty by 1939, but opened her own private music studio in her home in order to support herself. In 1944, at age sixty-one, she retired. She now dedicated herself to a campaign to have her father's Virginia birthplace preserved as a national monument. Before the success of that effort in May 1949, her efforts to memorialize her father bore fruit on May 23, 1946, when a bust of her father was installed in the Hall of Fame in New York, and also on August 7, 1946, when President Harry Truman signed a bill "authorizing the minting of five million Booker T. Washington commemorative fifty-cent coins." Portia also oversaw the establishment of the Booker T. Washington Foundation to provide academic scholarships for black students. Though she had resolved to leave Texas behind her, she traveled to Dallas one last time to attend the funeral of her former husband, who died on February 19, 1958. Although Portia suffered financial and health problems during the last years of her life, she remained interested in the ongoing effort of African Americans to acquire their civil rights. She was heartened by the heightened interest in black history during the 1960s and the assurance that her father would be remembered as a great African-American leader. She died on February 26, 1978, in Washington, D.C.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 44 Ernestine J. Covington Dent 15 By Bernadette Pruitt

Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent, pianist and educator, was born on May 19, 1904, in Houston, Texas. The daughter of two local icons, community activist and physician Jennie Belle (Murphy) Covington and Benjamin Jesse Covington, respectively, Ernestine began taking piano lessons at the age of four and inherited her parents’ musical traits. Benjamin Jesse Covington played several instruments and even performed with a quartet, probably in college; Jennie Covington began taking piano lessons while pregnant with Ernestine. In 1908 or 1909, the preschooler began taking piano lessons from a neighbor, Ernestine J. Covington Dent. Madame Corilla Rochon, a well-respected Courtesy of the Dent Family musician from Louisiana, who trained Collection. dozens of schoolchildren in Houston. Later as a preteen in 1915, Ernestine Covington studied the violin and trained under a local railway employee and New Orleans native, Will Nickerson, the brother of Howard University music professor Camille Nickerson. Ernestine eventually performed with her mother in the Ladies Symphony Orchestra, circa 1915, established by Jennie Covington, Rochon, and a German- American school teacher. The orchestra played free of charge at many local events in and around Houston for many years. A member of Bethel Baptist Church in Houston, the young pianist played for the church’s Sunday school and earned two dollars weekly for her services.

Women Across Texas History Series 45 At her father’s urging as well as the recommendation of Willie Nickerson, the gifted teen tried out for Oberlin College. She was accepted at the age of fourteen. The Covingtons, nervous about their adolescent daughter’s need for superior professional training, decided to delay her departure from Texas. The Houston Colored High School valedictorian entered Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1920 at the age of sixteen. She described Oberlin as “a fine school” and “simply beautiful to be there.” At Oberlin, where she majored in piano and minored in violin, Ernestine Jessie Covington studied music theory, musicianship, music appreciation, and musicology. Her graduation recital, which was performed with the conservatory orchestra, was Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, by Camille Saint-Saëns. After earning her bachelor’s degree in 1924, she applied for a one-year $1,000 fellowship with the Julliard Musical Foundation. She won four back-to-back fellowships from the Julliard foundation (later the Julliard Graduate School) and worked with pianist, music teacher, and critic Olga Samaroff (formally Lucy Hickenlooper of San Antonio) and Scottish- American pianist and composer James Friskin.

With a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, the musician returned to Oberlin in 1932 to continue her graduate studies and earned the master’s degree in piano the following year in 1934. She wrote her thesis on Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt and later performed as her recital Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54. The professional pianist performed regularly, becoming one of the most sought-after concert pianists on black college campuses in the 1920s and 1930s. While a Julliard fellow in New York from 1924 to 1928, she performed public concerts as a soloist and accompanist, especially for radio station WEAF. Reviews called her technique “magnificent” and tone “lovely.” As a teacher and mentor, she shared her musical talent. She taught music for a number of years, first in Houston at a music school she launched, and later at Bishop College in Marshall, where she served as department chair for the department of piano. Many of her students went on to have successful careers in teaching.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 46 The pianist also had a family. Ernestine Jessie Covington met her husband, businessman Albert Walter Dent, in the late 1920s while teaching at Bishop. The couple married in 1931. Their first son, future writer and civil-rights activist Thomas Covington Dent, was born in 1932. She retired from the concert circuit in 1936 at the age of thirty-two, after the birth of her second son, Benjamin Albert Dent. Their last son, Walter Jesse Dent, was born in 1939. The Dents moved to New Orleans in 1932 after Albert Dent was named hospital administrator of Flint-Goodridge Hospital, the only medical facility for the city’s African-American residents. Then in 1940 Dillard University named Dent its third president, a position he held for twenty-nine years; he retired in 1969. In the meantime, E. Jessie Covington Dent actively did volunteer work and still occasionally performed for charities. In 1956, while raising funds for her husband’s university, she inspired the beginning of Ebony Fashion Fair, which has raised nearly $50 million in scholarships for students. While she retired from professional life before reaching the age of thirty-five, Dent made a lasting impression in the music world and within the African-American community, especially in Houston and her adopted hometown, New Orleans, where she was Photograph, The Dent family, the inaugural recipient of the Amistad ca 1955. Courtesy of the Research Center’s Fine Arts Award in Amistad Research Center. 1985. Both her husband and eldest son Tom preceded her in death. She died on March 10, 2001, at the age of ninety-six at Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans. She was buried in Lake Lawn Park Cemetery in New Orleans. The Jessie Covington Dent Memorial Scholarship in Music was established in her honor at Dillard University.

Women Across Texas History Series 47 Jovita González de Mireles 16 By Cynthia E. Orozco & Teresa Palomo Acosta

Jovita González de Mireles, folklorist, historian, writer, and teacher, was born on her grandparents' rancho near Roma, Texas, on January 18, 1904. She was a fifth-generation descendant of a land-grant family. Her father was a teacher in Mier, Tamaulipas. She spoke only Spanish when she moved with her family to San Antonio in 1910, in part because her father prohibited use of the English language at home. Besides early schooling by her father, she attended schools in Roma and San Antonio. She obtained a B.A. degree in Spanish from Our Lady of the Lake College (now Our Lady of the Lake University) in San Antonio. In 1929 she was affiliated with the Junta del Club de Bellas Jovita González de Mireles. Artes, probably a middle-class organization of Courtesy of Humanities Mexican-descent women. She was a pioneer in Texas. collecting Mexican folklore in the Rio Grande valley and one of the first Texas Mexicans to obtain a master's degree and work as a professor. González was one of about thirty students of Mexican descent from the Rio Grande valley to attend the University of Texas in 1930 and one of 250 from the state. She was a member of the Newman Club and the Latin American Club. Her master's thesis, written in 1930, "Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties," was one of a few produced at the time that did not view Mexicans as a social problem. Eugene C. Barker directed her work, and González obtained a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct her study. She also obtained a letter of introduction from the

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 48 Catholic archbishop of San Antonio to introduce her to those she interviewed, and knitted during her interviews so that she would be considered "una persona decente" ("a down-to-earth person"). She met J. Frank Dobie, who interested her in collecting Mexican-American folklore, and became the first and only Mexican-American woman to serve as president of the Texas Folklore Society (1930–32).

Upon obtaining her M.A., González taught Spanish at St. Mary's Hall in San Antonio. In 1935 she married Edmundo E. Mireles, whom she met at the University of Texas and who also taught in San Antonio. After the wedding they taught in the San Felipe Independent School District, where she headed the English department. In 1939 El Progreso publisher Rodolfo Mirabal and others recruited Edmundo to teach in Corpus Christi, and the Mireleses moved there.

González de Mireles taught for twenty-one years at W. B. Ray High and Miller High in Corpus Christi. In 1941 she coauthored Mi Libro Español, Libro Uno with her husband and superintendent R. B. Fisher. In 1943 they published Libro Dos and Libro Tres. These texts included lessons on on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Martín De León, Lorenzo de Zavala, and Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. In 1949 Jovita and Edmundo coauthored six books for six levels called El Español Elemental, which included such folksongs as "Las Mañanitas" and "Allá en el Rancho Grande." Jovita participated in the Spanish Institute Edmundo set up and the Corpus Christi Spanish Program, which promoted Spanish in the public schools. She was also active as a club sponsor for Los Conquistadores, Los Colonizadores, and Los Pan Americanos. Her early published works include (in Texas and Southwestern Lore) "Folklore of the Texas-Mexican Vaquero" (1927), "America Invades the Border Towns" (1930), "Among My People" (1932), and "With the Coming of the Barbed Wire Came Hunger," as well as several pieces in Puro Mexicano, edited by Dobie. In 1937 she wrote "Latin Americans" for Our Racial and National Minorities: Their History, Contributions, and Present Problems, probably one of the first treatments of the topic by a person of Mexican descent. She mastered a variety of forms including narrative, proverbs, and songs.

Women Across Texas History Series 49 An audiotape about her contribution to folklore study was produced by Aida Barrera and the Southwest Center for Educational TV in 1983; it is now distributed by National Public Radio as "Sabor del Pueblo." In 1983 González de Mireles died of natural causes in Corpus Christi, where she was recognized as a local historian. The Mexican Americans in Texas History Conference, organized by the Texas State Historical Association, honored her in 1991. Her papers are housed at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin and in the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 50 Lulu Belle Madison White 17 By Merline Pitre

Lulu (or Lula) Belle Madison White, teacher and civil rights activist, was born in 1907, in Elmo, Texas, to Samuel Henry and Easter Madison. She attended elementary and high schools in Elmo and enrolled in Butler College in Tyler. Later she moved to Houston, where she met and married businessman Julius White. The couple raised two foster children. Shortly after her marriage, White enrolled at Prairie View College. After receiving a bachelor's degree in English, she embarked on a teaching career in the Height, a black community on the outskirts of Houston. Before White could be considered Lulu B. White. for a teaching post in the Houston Independent School District, she joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her husband had been a member of the Houston NAACP for some time and had been the plaintiff in several white primary cases. White resigned her teaching post in the Height community and devoted all of her time to the NAACP and its struggle to eliminate the state's white primary in the early 1930s. Until the late 1940s White served the NAACP as director of the Youth Council, fund-raiser, and organizer of new chapters throughout the state. In 1939 she became the president of the Houston chapter upon the death of C. F. Richardson. In 1943, under her fund-raising leadership, the Houston chapter became the largest in the South, and White became the first paid executive secretary.

Women Across Texas History Series 51 Her seven-year tenure in the post brought her state and national attention. After the Supreme Court handed down its 1944 decision in Smith v. Allwright, which finally outlawed the white primary, White was at the forefront of educating blacks to vote. When the NAACP looked for a case that would integrate the University of Texas in 1945, White chose the plaintiff, Heman Marion Sweatt, and, with the legal core of the NAACP, pursued the case of Sweatt v. Painter to the Supreme Court. Sweatt later credited White's leadership for maintaining his own resolve. White was also in the vanguard of the movement to get equal salaries for black and white teachers. When local blacks reported cases of discrimination in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Lulu White was the one who responded. Politically liberal, White joined James Frank Dobie, Sweatt, and others in 1948 in an effort to get Henry Wallace's Progressive party on the presidential ballot in Texas. White's friendships with Walter White, Daisy Lampkin, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins enabled her to exert influence on the NAACP nationally. She resigned as executive secretary of the Houston chapter in 1949 and became state director of the NAACP. She remained in the latter post until her death on July 6, 1957, possibly of heart failure. She was buried in Houston. The week before her death the national NAACP established the Lulu White Freedom Fund in her honor.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 52 Mary Edna Gearing 18 By Judith N. McArthur

Mary Edna Gearing, home economist and educator, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 22, 1872, the daughter of F. A. G. and Emily Virginia (Marston) Gearing. After graduating from high school in Houston, Texas, in 1888, she studied under private tutors, and between 1905 and 1909, she took summer courses in domestic science at Columbia University. In 1906, the Houston School Board appointed her to establish the first home economics program, one of the earliest in the state, for the city's public schools, and two years later she was made supervisor of domestic science and arts for the school system. In 1911, Gearing headed the domestic science department at New York University, but she Mary Edna Gearing. Courtesy returned to Texas at the request of University of the Briscoe Center for of Texas president Sidney Edward Mezes in American History. January of 1912, to begin a home economics program for the university. As an associate professor in the School of Domestic Economy, Gearing taught her first courses in a two-room wooden outbuilding. She promoted the new program by staging a series of annual home economics weeks, featuring special lecturers and demonstrations, as a community and state service. She was the first woman to hold the ranks of professor and department chairman at the University of Texas, and she nurtured and shaped the School of Domestic Economy. By 1921, the name

Women Across Texas History Series 53 was changed to the Department of Home Economics. When Gearing retired in 1942, after thirty-one years as chairman, the department offered six majors and included a food technology research division and an established graduate program. Gearing specialized in family economics and was an early advocate of establishing campus nursery schools to serve as laboratories in child development for home economics students. In 1927 she helped the university establish the first nursery school in Texas with a grant from the state health department, and by 1929 the Department of Home Economics was operating the nursery with university funding. After participating in the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection in Washington, D.C., in 1930, Gearing attempted to establish a Foundation for Child Welfare and Parent Education at the University of Texas, but the Great Depression frustrated her efforts to raise the necessary $500,000. She planned to resume fundraising after her retirement, but these plans were interrupted by World War II. The terms of her will, which left three bequests to the university, specified that proceeds from the sale of her house be used to further a Child Welfare and Parent Education Foundation.

Mary Gearing was one of a small group of teachers that met yearly at Lake Placid, New York, between 1902 and 1909 to discuss education to improve the quality and standards of individual and family life. The Lake Placid group became the nucleus of the American Home Economics Association. Gearing was a founding member and was elected to honorary life membership in 1939. She headed the Urban Food Conservation Program for the United States Department of Agriculture during World War I, and in 1918 took a leave of absence from teaching to serve with Herbert Hoover in the War Food Administration. Gearing was a founding member of the Texas Home Economics Association and served as its first president; under her direction it developed and published a syllabus outlining a statewide course of study in home economics for elementary and secondary schools. On her retirement, the Texas Home Economics Association established a

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 54 two-year Mary E. Gearing Scholarship at the University of Texas Nursery School in recognition of her interest in the field of child development and her contributions to home economics. She was also a member of Omicron Nu, the American Association of University Professors, and the Texas State Teachers Association. Mary Gearing died in Houston on May 10, 1946, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery. In 1976 the Home Economics Building at the University of Texas at Austin was renamed to honor her, and in 1981 the regents of the University of Texas System established the Mary E. Gearing Endowed Lectureship in the Department of Home Economics.

Women Across Texas History Series 55 Adele Lubbock Briscoe Looscan 19 By Claudia Hazlewood

Adele Lubbock Briscoe Looscan, Texas clubwoman and writer, the daughter of Andrew and Mary Jane (Harris) Briscoe, was born in Harrisburg, Texas, on February 5, 1848. She graduated from Miss Mary B. Brown's Young Ladies' School at Houston in 1866. On September 13, 1881, she married Maj. Michael Looscan, Confederate officer, lawyer, and county attorney of Harris County. In 1885, Mrs. Looscan organized the Ladies Reading Club of Houston and made it a model for similar study clubs in the state. She was one of the founders and chairman of the executive board of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, which was organized in her mother's home, and was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Adele Lubbock Briscoe Looscan. Courtesy of the Portal to Texas History. Mrs. Looscan was a charter member of the Houston Pen Women, the Texas Woman's Press Association, and the Texas State Historical Association. She served as president of TSHA from 1915 to 1925, and contributed articles to the Quarterly. She wrote three articles included in Dudley G. Wooten's A Comprehensive History of Texas (1898) and other articles published in various journals, including the Texas Messenger, Ladies' Messenger, and Texas Magazine.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 56 She sometimes used the pen name "Texan." Mrs. Looscan moved to her mother's home after her husband's death in 1897 and became an invalid in 1929. She died at Houston on November 23, 1935, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Houston. Her library of 1,500 works, mostly relating to Texas history, was donated to the Houston Public Library. Her portrait was given to the library in 1936, and a branch library was named in her honor in 1956.

Women Across Texas History Series 57 Sara Estela Ramírez 20 By Teresa Palomo Acosta

Sara Estela Ramírez, poet and political figure, was born in Villa de Progreso, Coahuila, Mexico, in 1881. Her mother died during her youth, leaving her to take care of her father and younger sister. She spent her early years in northern Mexico, completed public school in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and graduated from Ateneo Fuentes, a teachers' college in Saltillo, Coahuila. In 1898, at the age of seventeen, she settled in Laredo, Texas, and took a position as a Spanish teacher at the Seminario Laredo. She spent the rest of her life in that city, where she became a popular writer among Mexican Americans and a prominent supporter of the Partido Liberal Mexicano, the most progressive political party in the era leading to the Mexican Revolution. As a leader in PLM, Ramírez often represented the party before the public, due to the harassment of the group by local authorities and Pinkerton and Furlong detectives. She was a close friend of Ricardo Flores Magón, noted leader of the PLM, with whom she corresponded between 1901 and 1904.

She probably published most of her poetry and essays in such Spanish- language newspapers as El Demócrata Fronterizo and La Crónica, two influential journals in South Texas at the turn of the century. Starting in June 1901, she herself became a publisher of two newspapers-La Corregidora and Aurora. The former, which featured literary works, was printed in Mexico City and distributed in Laredo and San Antonio. It is likely that Ramírez published La Corregidora while working for PLM in Mexico and Texas. During the last years of her life, she also oversaw the publication of Aurora in Laredo. No copies of either newspaper are extant. In addition to her direct involvement with these publications, she also collaborated with Juana Gutiérrez B. de Mendoza on Vesper: Justicia y Libertad, another newspaper for the Mexican working class and women. Her journalism was apparently

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 58 tied to her work with Regeneración y Concordia, a feminist organization to which she belonged. Ramírez joined hands with Juana Gutiérrez B. de Mendoza, Elisa Acuña y Rosetti, and Dolores Jiménez y Muro to bring attention to women's concerns and is considered, along with them, one of the founders of Mexican feminism. Twenty-one of her poems and essays, all published between January 8, 1908, and April 9, 1910, constitute the body of her known work. These pieces, though small in number, have provided insights into her ideas about politics, women, and Tejanos. They have also illuminated the literary interests and achievements of Texas Mexican women, whose works have remained largely unpublished. Moreover, her political activities on behalf of PLM and women's causes made her a forerunner to the founders of Ladies LULAC, the American G.I. Forum Women's Auxiliary, and Mujeres por la Raza. Writers who emerged from the Chicano movement and the Chicano Literary Renaissance also owe a large debt to her contributions. Ramírez's poems, all presumably written in Spanish, cover at least four themes: "philosophy, politics, male-female relationships, and sisterhood." Works such as "Diamantes Negros," "A Juárez," "Huye" ("Flee"), and "Surge" address some of these themes, with the poet ranging over a wide array of emotions in each one. In "Diamantes Negros" she stresses the existence of grave obstacles to happiness and catalogues ways to overcome them; in "A Juárez" she combines an ode to patriotism with a recollection of Mexico's struggle to gain freedom; in "Huye" she raises the problem of maintaining one's faith in life; and in "Surge" she asserts the reality of female strength. Further, Ramírez evoked the bicultural nature of Tejano life along the border throughout her work. Besides her poetry, she wrote a play, "Noema," and published a few of the speeches she made to the members of the Sociedad de Obreros (Workers' Society). One of these talks—"Igualdad y Progreso" ("Equality and Progress")—reflected her participation in the local labor-unionizing efforts among Hispanics.

Women Across Texas History Series 59 Ramírez was about twenty-nine years old when she died on August 21, 1910, in Laredo, twelve years after arriving in Texas. She had apparently been ill for some time, but the exact cause of her death is unknown. She was eulogized in La Crónica by fellow writer Jovita Idar, who praised her accomplishments and bestowed on her the nickname "La Musa Texana."

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 60 Leonor Villegas de Magnon 21 By Nancy Baker Jones

Leonor Villegas de Magnon, founder of La Cruz Blanca, was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1876, the daughter of Joaquín and Helosia Villegas. She was educated in the United States and married an American citizen, Adolpho Magnon, in 1901. The couple had three children. Her father moved to the Leonor Villegas de Magnon (back) and Aracelito United States to escape the Garcia with the flag of La Cruz Blanca in 1914. Courtesy of the University of Houston. difficulties of the Mexican Revolution, and when Leonor and her children attended his funeral in Laredo in 1910, warfare prevented their return to Mexico. She remained in the city and opened a kindergarten in her home. Sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and nicknamed La Rebelde, Leonor Villegas de Magnon, with her friend Jovita Idar, wrote for La Crónica, a Laredo newspaper published by Nicasio Idar.

When Nuevo Laredo was attacked in March 1913 the two friends and other Laredo women crossed the Rio Grande to nurse the wounded. To assure more organized assistance and to secure medical supplies, Leonor formed and financed La Cruz Blanca, the White Cross. After Nuevo Laredo was attacked again on January 1, 1914, she transformed her Laredo home, garage, and school into hospitals for wounded soldiers who crossed the river. More than 100 of Venustiano Carranza's men were treated in her wards during that

Women Across Texas History Series 61 January. When American army officials attempted to arrest and inter the Mexican soldier-patients, she refused to release them and organized the escape of several patients by having visitors secretly bring them clean street clothes. After nearly forty men were taken into custody at Fort McIntosh, she hired an attorney to seek their release. Their attempts to convince Governor Oscar B. Colquitt to intervene in the soldiers' behalf were unsuccessful, but eventually Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan ordered the men freed. Later in 1914 Leonor Villegas de Magnon and twenty-five other nurses joined Carranza's army at Ciudad Juárez and traveled with them to Mexico City. The Mexican government awarded her five medals for her work during the revolution. She died in Mexico City on April 17, 1955. She wrote an account of her experiences that was published in Spanish in the Laredo Times in 1961.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 62 Ida Mercedes Muse Darden 22 By George N. Green

Ida Darden, conservative dissident, was born on March 9, 1886, into the Muse family, evidently in Bosque County, Texas, but the family soon moved to Moran. She claimed that her family staunchly opposed reform governor James S. Hogg and that Senator Joseph W. Bailey was a frequent visitor to their farm home. After briefly taking courses at a business college and at the University of Texas, in 1904, she married Bert Darden, an employee of Swift and Company in Fort Worth. The couple had a daughter, Helen, in 1905. Darden died in 1906, and Ida took up secretarial work. By the next decade she Ida Darden. Courtesy of the and her brother, Vance Muse, were University of Texas at Arlington. employed by Bailey's friends, financier J. A. Arnold, for whom Ida worked, and lumber magnate John Henry Kirby, who employed Muse. They worked as publicists, fund-raisers, and lobbyists for a variety of conservative organizations, and the relationships lasted until the deaths of Kirby and Arnold in the 1940s. Ida was also employed by Pauline K. Wells as publicity director of the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1916. The two women depicted woman suffrage as a socialist plot that would undermine white supremacy. Around 1920 Ida Darden married Fort Worth businessman Walter Myrick, who joined her and Muse in various projects. Their Southern Tariff Association, which lobbied for Arnold in the 1920s on behalf of higher tariffs for southern products, was investigated by Congress.

Women Across Texas History Series 63 Ida Darden denounced the Ku Klux Klan and voted for Al Smith in 1928. In 1932 she ran for congressman at large in the Democratic primary, believing the main issue to be stamping out prohibition, though she was personally dry. She published her first booklet in 1936, a gentle, tongue-in- cheek look at the Texas legislature, Gentlemen of the House.

By 1949, after decades of operating mostly behind the scenes, she was ready for a more public life. Financed largely by such Texas oilmen as George W. Armstrong and Arch Rowan, Darden launched her Southern Conservative, an eight-page newspaper, in Fort Worth in January 1950. Her major task was to take on the Communists, though she considered the fight nearly hopeless since she thought that Communist thinking had dominated all three branches of the government since 1933. Dwight D. Eisenhower, she thought, was as much a dupe of the Reds as Franklin Roosevelt. She considered the civil- rights movement, modern art, and modern movies all to be abominations perpetuated by inferior people. In 1959 she editorialized for the impeachment of all members of the United States Supreme Court. Darden was a Protestant, but she believed that the Protestant churches, having succumbed to the subversive social gospel, were increasingly atheistic. She alleged that all taxation was larceny and should be abolished, and that Edna Ferber's Giant was Communist propaganda from cover to cover, with its depictions of children who repudiated their parents for accumulating property and humiliated their fathers by marrying down. Darden terminated the paper in December 1961 and moved to Houston. She published two more booklets around this time—My Night (1951), a witty parody of Eleanor Roosevelt's "My Day" newspaper column, and Best of the Southern Conservative (1963), selected articles from her paper. Though most contemporary observers in Fort Worth in the 1950s regarded Darden as a crackpot, she did not lack influence. In the 1950s the Minute Women of the U.S.A. took over the Houston school board and harassed and fired teachers and administrators for alleged Communism. One of the two original organizers of the Minute Women was Darden's daughter, Helen Thomas, who was very close to her mother and was the resident intellectual and researcher in the organization. The C.I.O. News blamed the Southern

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 64 Conservative for helping the Minute Women bar the annual United Nations essay contests in the Houston schools. A number of tumultuous events in Texas in the 1950s heartened ultraconservatives, and Ida Darden was with them every step of the way. Her columns were carried by or quoted favorably in daily papers in Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, and Lubbock. She died on March 24, 1980, in Holly Hall, New Hampshire, and is buried in Fort Worth.

Women Across Texas History Series 65 Miriam Amanda Ferguson 23 By John D. Huddleston

Miriam Amanda (Ma) Ferguson, first woman governor of Texas, daughter of Joseph L. and Eliza (Garrison) Wallace, was born in Bell County, Texas, on June 13, 1875. She attended Salado College and Baylor Female College at Belton. In 1899, at the age of twenty-four, she married James Edward Ferguson, also of Bell County. Mrs. Ferguson served as the first lady of Texas during the gubernatorial terms of her husband (1915–17), who was impeached during his second administration. When James Ferguson failed to get his name on the ballot in 1924, Miriam entered the race for the Texas governorship. Before announcing for office, she had devoted her energies almost exclusively Miriam Ferguson. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. to her husband and two daughters. This fact, and the combination of her first and middle initials, led her supporters to call her "Ma" Ferguson. She quickly assured Texans that if elected she would follow the advice of her husband and that Texas thus would gain "two governors for the price of one." Her campaign sought vindication for the Ferguson name, promised extensive cuts in state appropriations, condemned the Ku Klux Klan, and opposed passing new liquor legislation. After trailing the Klan-supported prohibitionist candidate, Felix D. Robertson, in the July primary, she easily defeated him in the August run-off to become the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. In November 1924 she handily defeated the Republican nominee, George C. Butte, a former dean of the University of Texas law school.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 66 Inaugurated fifteen days after Wyoming's Nellie Ross, Miriam Ferguson became the second woman governor in United States history.

Political strife and controversy characterized her first administration. Although she did fulfill a campaign promise to secure an anti-mask law against the Ku Klux Klan, the courts overturned it. State expenditures were slightly increased, despite a campaign pledge to cut the budget by $15 million. The focal point of discontent centered upon irregularities both in the granting of pardons and paroles and in the letting of road contracts by the state highway department. Ma Ferguson pardoned an average of 100 convicts a month, and she and "Pa" were accused by critics of accepting bribes of land and cash payments. Critics also charged that the Ferguson-appointed state highway commission granted road contracts to Ferguson friends and political supporters in return for lucrative kickbacks. Though a threat to impeach Miriam Ferguson failed, these One of the many pardons issued by controversies helped Attorney General Governor Miriam Ferguson. Daniel James Moody defeat Mrs. Courtesy of the Texas State Library Ferguson for re-nomination in 1926 and and Archives Commission. win the governorship.

Miriam Ferguson did not seek office in 1928. However, after the Texas Supreme Court again rejected her husband's petition to place his name on the ballot in 1930, she entered the gubernatorial race. In the May primary she led Ross Sterling, who then defeated her in the August runoff.

Women Across Texas History Series 67 Her defeat proved fortuitous politically because Sterling, rather than she, was blamed by the voters when Texas began to feel the full impact of the Great Depression. In February 1932 she again declared for the governorship; she promised to lower taxes and cut state expenditures, and condemned alleged waste, graft, and political favoritism by the Sterling-controlled highway commission. After leading Sterling in the May primary by over 100,000 votes, Ma Ferguson narrowly won the Democratic nomination in the August primary. She then defeated the Republican nominee, Orville Bullington, in November to secure her second term as governor. Her second administration did not engender as much controversy as the first, despite dire predictions to the contrary by her political opponents. The fiscally conservative governor held the line on state expenditures and even advocated a state sales tax and corporate income tax, although the state legislature did not act on these proposals. Mrs. Ferguson continued her liberal pardoning and parole policies, but even that action did not stir as much controversy as in her first administration since every convict paroled or pardoned represented that much less fiscal strain on the state during the depression.

In 1934 the Fergusons temporarily retired from direct involvement in politics and also refused to seek office in 1936 and 1938. However, Ma Ferguson did declare for governor once again in 1940. Although sixty-five years old, she alleged that she could not resist a "popular draft" for the nomination and joined a field of prominent Democrats that included incumbent governor W. Lee O'Daniel. Ma's platform advocated a 25 percent cut in state appropriations, a gross-receipts tax of .5 percent to raise social security funds for the elderly, support for organized labor, and liberal funding for secondary and higher education. O'Daniel proved to be too popular to unseat, but the Ferguson name was still strong enough to poll more than 100,000 votes. After her husband's death in 1944, Miriam Ferguson retired to private life in Austin. She died of heart failure on June 25, 1961, and was buried alongside her husband in the State Cemetery in Austin.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 68 Edith Eunice Therrel Wilmans 24 By Edith Eunice Wilmans Malone

Edith Eunice Therrel Wilmans, first woman elected to the Texas legislature, was born on December 21, 1882, at Lake Providence, East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, the daughter of Benjamin Franklin and Mary Elizabeth (Grier) Therrel. She attended public schools in Dallas, where her parents had moved in 1885. She married Jacob Hall Wilmans on December 25, 1900; they had three daughters. In 1914, Edith Wilmans helped organize the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association; later she helped organize the Dallas Housewives League and the Democratic Women of Dallas County, and she was president of the Democratic Women's Association of Texas. To learn more about the legal problems involved in improving the status Edith Eunice Therrel Wilmans. of women and children, she studied law and in Courtesy of the Texas State 1918, was admitted to the bar. In 1922, she was Library and Archives. elected to the Thirty-eighth Texas Legislature, where she represented Dallas County, District 50, in 1923, the year her husband died. While in the legislature she endorsed legislation for child support and child care and for the establishment of the Dallas County District Court of Domestic Relations. She served only one term in the legislature, and in 1924 and 1926 she ran unsuccessfully for governor. In 1925, Governor Pat M. Neff appointed her to the All-Woman Supreme Court; she was disqualified from serving because she lacked by a few months the required seven years' experience in the practice of law. In 1929, she married Henry A. Born of Chicago; the marriage ended in divorce, and she returned to Dallas to practice law.

Women Across Texas History Series 69 She ran for the legislature again in 1935, but was defeated; that same year she bought a farm home near Vineyard, Jack County. She was a candidate for the Thirteenth District congressional seat in 1948 and again in a 1951 special election but lost both races. In 1958, Edith Wilmans returned to Dallas, and she died there on March 21, 1966. She was buried in Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 70 Sarah Eleanor Cory Menezes 25 By Allison Faber

Sarah Eleanor Cory Menezes, assistant United States attorney, longtime Republican Party member, and reform activist, was born in December 1885, in Fort Scott, Kansas, to lawyer and popular historian Charles Estabrook Cory (1853-1933) and Ruth Emeline (Kellogg) Cory Texas League of Women Voters Front row, left to right: (1852-1930). As a young Helen Moore, D.W. Kempner of Galveston, Sarah T. person, Menezes learned Hughes. Back row, left to right: Mrs. Sarah Corey Menezes, the law from her father Mrs. Harris Masterson of Houston, Mrs. Anna B. Cade of in his law office and, at Chester, Mrs. J.W. Hopkins of Galveston , Mrs. Charles J. sixteen years of age, Stubbs of Galveston, Mrs. O. H. Carlisle of Houston. Dallas Morning News, May 25, 1929. worked as the official stenographer of the Fort Scott bankruptcy court. Sometime later, she entered the University of Kansas where she studied law and worked as a secretary to the dean of the law school, James Green. After completing her studies, she moved back to Fort Scott where she married Harry Menezes on April 28, 1912. The couple moved to Dallas the next year, and in 1915 Harry was employed as a stone and marble cutter while Sarah worked as a secretary for a Dallas law firm. Menezes passed the State Bar examination and earned the highest score of all State Bar exams taken in the year of 1916.

Women Across Texas History Series 71 The Dallas Morning News later credited her as only the third woman to be admitted to the Texas Bar at that time. In 1918 Menezes was appointed deputy district superintendent for the fourteenth district of the War Risk Insurance Bureau and served under Royall R. Watkins. Her husband, at the time a first lieutenant in the 144th Infantry, United States Army, served in France during World War I. Menezes was a longtime and influential member of the Republican Party. In 1924 she directed the Women’s State Organization for the election of George C. Butte who ran against Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in the gubernatorial election of 1924. The same year, she joined the Dallas branch of the Zonta Club, which was geared toward professional women. Sarah eventually served as the president of the Dallas Zonta Club and regional chairwoman for the Dallas district. In 1925 Menezes served as the president of the Dallas League of Women Voters and remained in the position until 1927. Their goal was to mobilize voters in Texas and was non-partisan. In 1925 during Prohibition, Menezes was appointed clerk and assistant United States attorney and was the first woman to represent the Northern District of Texas in federal courts. She set a record for liquor prosecutions by having only one acquittal in a two-week session in 1926. The following year she continued to serve as assistant United States attorney, and she prosecuted violations of the Volstead Act, without the clerking duties. After the presidential election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, Menezes, a Republican, resigned her position in 1933, as tradition dictated. Menezes continued her role in Republican politics by serving as the first vice president of the Dallas County Republican Women’s Club in 1936. That same year she embarked on a speaking tour on behalf of Kansas Governor Alf M. Landon, the Republican candidate for president. In 1937 she ran for a seat on the Dallas city council and was the only woman listed as running. In 1938 she was appointed to serve as conciliation commissioner for Dallas County where she worked on bankruptcy cases dealing with farmers. She also was chosen to be the woman representative to the Republican State Executive Committee for the Eleventh District alongside Walter Rogers and remained in this post into the 1940s.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 72 Menezes, sponsored by the Dallas Business and Professional Women’s Club, prepared a petition and filed a suit in 1938. This suit challenged the discrimination of women in regard to the right to serve on juries. After the failed attempt, alongside longtime friend, Sarah T. Hughes, Menezes continued to advocate full citizenship rights of women into the 1940s (see WOMEN AND THE LAW).

When her husband retired from his post as commandant of cadets at North Dallas High School in 1956, they eventually settled in Irving. Her husband died in 1962. Menezes was a longtime member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Irving and remained active in various organizations including the Republicans Club of Irving, Dallas Republican Women, Daughters of the American Revolution, American Legion Auxiliary, Business and Professional Women’s Club, and the Federal Retired Persons. She died on April 15, 1977, at ninety-one years of age. She was buried in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas, and is memorialized in the Plaza of Heroines in Carrie Chapman Catt Hall at Iowa State University.

Women Across Texas History Series 73 Bessie Coleman 26 By Roni Morales

Bessie Coleman (Brave Bessie or Queen Bess), the world's first licensed black pilot, daughter of Susan Coleman, was born in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, the twelfth of thirteen children. She grew up in Waxahachie. Her father left the family in 1900 to return to Indian Territory. Bessie, along with several siblings still living at home, helped ease the family's financial troubles by picking cotton or assisting with the washing and ironing that her mother took in. Upon graduation from high school she enrolled at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma. Financial difficulties, Bessie Coleman. Courtesy of the however, forced her quit after one semester. Corbis Corporation. She moved to Chicago, where a brother was then living, and attended beauty school for a time. She spent the early years of World War I working as a manicurist at the White Sox Barbershop. She then operated a small but profitable chili parlor. Apparently in early 1917 Bessie Coleman married Claude Glenn, but she never publicly acknowledged the marriage, and the two soon separated.

In 1920 Coleman, acting on a lifelong dream of learning to fly, traveled abroad to attend aviation school in Le Crotoy, France, after she discovered that no American school would accept African Americans. Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Chicago Weekly Defender, assisted her in contacting schools abroad. After studying for ten months in France she was issued a license on

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 74 June 15, 1921, by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, giving her the distinction of being the first black person in the world to become a licensed pilot. She returned to the United States in 1921. Her goal, in addition to making flying her career, was to open a flying school for black students. In 1922 she made a second trip to Europe and during her studies took lessons from the chief pilot for the Fokker Aircraft Company in Germany. Coleman's first American air show was at Curtiss Field, near Manhattan, on September 3, 1922. She followed the success of this show with exhibition flights all over the country, many of them in her native South. After several years of touring the East and West coasts, she traveled back to Texas and established her headquarters in Houston in 1925. Her first performance in Texas took place in that city on Bessie Coleman, shown with her Curtiss June 19, 1925. Her daredevil “Jenny” biplane, ca. 1924. Courtesy of Getty stunts and hair-raising Images. maneuvers earned her the nickname "Brave Bessie." She primarily flew Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” planes and army surplus aircraft left over from the war. During her trips she often gave lectures to schools and churches to encourage young black men and women to enter aviation. On one occasion in Waxahachie she refused to give an exhibition on white school grounds unless blacks were permitted to use the same entrance as whites. The request was granted, although blacks and whites remained segregated once inside. Early in her career she was presented a loving cup for her achievements from the cast of Shuffle Along, a black Broadway musical. By 1926, the year of her death, Coleman had become one of America's most popular stunt fliers.

Women Across Texas History Series 75 She had her first major accident in 1924 while barnstorming in California, and she took a year off to recover. On April 30, 1926, she died during a test flight before a show sponsored by the Negro Welfare League in Jacksonville, Florida. About twelve minutes into the flight, the plane did not pull out of a nosedive as planned; instead, it did a somersault and dropped Bessie Coleman to her death. Her mechanic and publicity agent, William Wills, fell with the plane and died on impact. Although the charred condition of the wreckage prevented a full investigation, the crash was believed to have been caused by a loose wrench that jammed the plane's controls. After funeral services in Commemorative Jacksonville, which were attended by hundreds of stamp of Bessie admirers, Coleman's body was returned to Chicago, Coleman, issued in 1995. Courtesy of the where she had made her home. She is buried there in Lincoln Cemetery. Although her dream of Florida Times-Union. establishing a flying school for black students never materialized, the Bessie Coleman Aero groups were organized after her death. On Labor Day, 1931, these flying clubs sponsored the first all-black air show in America, which attracted 15,000 spectators. Over the years, recognition of Coleman's accomplishments has grown. In 1977 a group of black female student pilots in Indiana organized the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club. In 1990 a street in Chicago was renamed Bessie Coleman Drive, and May 2, 1992, was declared Bessie Coleman Day in Chicago. In 1995 the United States Postal Service issued a thirty-two-cent commemorative stamp in her honor. Bessie Coleman historical marker.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 76 Ima Hogg 27 By Virginia Bernhard

Ima Hogg, philanthropist and patron of the arts, daughter of Sarah Ann (Stinson) and Governor James Stephen Hogg, was born in Mineola, Texas, on July 10, 1882. She had three brothers, William Clifford Hogg, born in 1875; Michael, born in 1885; and Thomas Elisha Hogg, born in 1887. According to family history, Ima was named for the heroine of a Civil War poem written by her uncle Thomas Elisha. Her name became a part of Texas folklore, along with the myth of a fictitious sister supposedly named Ura. Ima Hogg was affectionately known as Miss Ima for most of her long life. She was eight years old when her father was elected governor; she spent much of her early Ima Hogg, circa 1900. life in Austin. After her mother died of Courtesy of the Museum of Tuberculosis in 1895, Ima attended the Coronal Fine Arts in Houston. Institute in San Marcos, and in 1899 she entered the University of Texas. She started playing the piano at age three and in 1901 went to New York to study music. Her father’s illness drew her back to Texas in 1905. After his death in 1906 she continued her music studies in Berlin and Vienna from 1907 to 1909. She then moved to Houston, where she gave piano lessons to a select group of pupils and helped found the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which played its first concert in June 1913. Miss Ima served as the first vice president of the Houston Symphony Society and became president in 1917. She became ill in late 1918 and spent the next two years in Philadelphia under the care of a specialist in mental and nervous disorders. She did not return to Houston to live until 1923.

Women Across Texas History Series 77 In the meantime, oil had been struck on the Hogg property near West Columbia, Texas, and by the late 1920s Miss Ima was involved in a wide range of philanthropic projects. In 1929 she founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, an agency to provide therapy and counseling for disturbed children and their families. In 1940, with a bequest from her brother Will, who had died in 1930, she established the Hogg Foundation for Mental Hygiene, which later became the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas. In 1943 Miss Hogg, a lifelong Democrat, won an election to the Houston school board, where she worked to establish symphony concerts for schoolchildren, to get equal pay for teachers regardless of sex or race, and to set up a painting-to- music program in the public schools. Varner-Hogg Plantation Historical Site. Courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission. In 1946 she again became president of the Houston Symphony Society, a post she held until 1956, and in 1948 she became the first woman president of the Philosophical Society of Texas. Since the 1920s she had been studying and collecting early American art and antiques, and in 1966 she presented her collection and Bayou Bend, the River Oaks mansion she and her brothers had built in 1927, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The Bayou Bend Collection, recognized as one of the finest of its kind, draws thousands of visitors each year.

In the 1950s Miss Ima restored the Hogg family home at Varner Plantation near West Columbia, and in 1958 she presented it to the state of Texas. It became Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historical Site. In the 1960s she restored the Winedale Inn, a nineteenth-century stagecoach stop at Round Top, Texas, which she gave to the University of Texas. The Winedale Historical Center now serves as a center for the study of Texas history and is

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 78 also the site of a widely acclaimed annual fine arts festival. Miss Hogg also restored her parents' home at Quitman, Texas, and in 1969 the town of Quitman established the Ima Hogg Museum in her honor. In 1953 Governor Allan Shivers appointed her to the Texas State Historical Survey Committee (later the Texas Historical Commission), and in 1967 that body gave her an award for "meritorious service in historic preservation." In 1960 she served on a committee appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for the planning of the National Cultural Center (now Kennedy Center) in Washington, D.C. In 1962, at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, Ima Hogg served on an advisory panel to aid in the search for historic furniture for the White House. She was also honored by the Garden Club of America (1959), the National Trust for Historic Preservation (1966), and the American Association for State and Local History (1969).

In 1968 Miss Hogg was the first recipient of the Santa Rita Award, given by the University of Texas System to recognize contributions to the university and to higher education. In 1969 she, Oveta Culp Hobby, and Lady Bird Johnson became the first three women members of the Academy of Texas, an organization founded to honor persons who "enrich, enlarge, or enlighten" knowledge in any field. In 1971 Southwestern University gave Miss Hogg an honorary doctorate in fine arts, and in 1972 the National Society of Interior Designers gave her its Thomas Jefferson Award for outstanding contributions to America's cultural heritage. The Houston Symphony established in her name an annual instrumental contest for young musicians (ages thirteen to thirty)—the Ima Hogg Competition. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History presented an annual Ima Hogg Award for Historical Achievement.

On August 19, 1975, at the age of ninety-three, Ima Hogg died of complications from a traffic accident that occurred while she was vacationing in England. Her funeral was at Bayou Bend. She was buried on August 23 in the Hogg family plot in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin. The major benefactor in her will was the Ima Hogg Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization she established in 1964.

Women Across Texas History Series 79 Julia Bedford Ideson 28 By Sharon Bice Endelman and R. Matt Abigail

Julia Bedford Ideson, pioneer librarian and civic activist, daughter of John Castree and Rosalie (Beasman) Ideson, was born on July 15, 1880, in Hastings, Nebraska. Her father owned a bookstore in Hastings, where she and her sister, Margaret, attended the Academy of the Visitation, a Catholic convent school. The family moved to Houston, Texas, in 1892, where Ideson attended public schools and graduated from Houston High School in 1899. She then enrolled in the first program in library science offered by the University of Texas at Austin. While in college, Ideson was an assistant cataloguer in the school library, a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and the Ashbel Photograph, Julia Ideson. literary society, and served as associate editor of Courtesy of the Houston the University of Texas literary magazine. Metropolitan Research Center. After graduating from the University of Texas in 1903, and with ample recommendations from her advising professors, Ideson was appointed librarian of the new Houston Lyceum and Carnegie Library (see HOUSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY). She held this position for more than forty years and, in anticipation of Houston's rapid growth, engineered a dramatic expansion of the city's public library system. By the time of her death in 1945, the library's collection had increased from 13,228 to 265,707 volumes, and annual circulation had risen from 60,000 to 600,000. Her efforts to improve physical facilities had also resulted in the addition of five branches, a new Central Library built in Spanish Renaissance style, and the first municipal bookmobile in the state.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 80 Julia Ideson served as secretary (1907–09) and president (1910–11) of the Texas Library Association, president of the Southwestern Library Association (1932–34), and first vice president of the American Library Association (1932–33). She served on the Legislative Committee of the Texas Library Association, where she helped to prepare an amendment to the County Library Law of 1915 and opposed a bill that would have abolished the Texas State Library in 1933. Ideson also played a central role in the establishment of the Colored Carnegie Library, Houston's first public library for African American patrons, and volunteered to train its inaugural staff in 1913. Providing library services for blacks in the South remained one of her primary concerns and was the topic of her address at the American Library Association meeting at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1923. She also convinced the Texas Library Association to form a special committee on penal libraries in 1925 and later served as a library consultant for the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. Additionally, she edited multiple volumes of the Texas Library Association's Handbook of Texas Libraries.

Throughout her career, she remained an active supporter of various civic causes and organizations. As a member of the Women's Political Union, she spoke at the first open-air woman suffrage rally in Texas in 1915 and helped to arrange a reception for the visiting Emmeline Pankhurst. Like many suffragists, she American Library Association volunteers. Julia Ideson is second from right. Courtesy of the turned her attention to the war University of Illinois Archives. effort; she campaigned for Liberty Bonds and served eight months at a field library in Brest, France. In later years she was active in such groups as the League of Women Voters, the Houston Open Forum, the Foreign Policy Association, and the Texas

Women Across Texas History Series 81 Interracial Commission. Her professional and civic achievements brought her recognition in 1929 as the Torchbearer of the Year and in 1932 as the first Houston woman included in Who's Who in America.

Julia Ideson died on July 15, 1945, while on a visit to Pennsylvania. The Central Library building, erected in 1926 and later named in her honor, was renovated and reopened in 1979 to house the archives, special collections, and Texas Room of the Houston Public Library.

Front entrance of the Julia Ideson Building, Houston Public Library. Courtesy of Tim Stanley Photography.

Women Across Texas History Series 82 Carrie Marcus Neiman 29 By Dorothy D. DeMoss

Carrie Marcus Neiman, merchant and fashion authority, was born on May 3, 1883, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jacob and Delia (Bloomfield) Marcus, German immigrants. In 1895 she moved with her family to Hillsboro, Texas. Although Carrie did not complete a formal high school education, she enjoyed a cultured home environment that encouraged reading in the excellent family library and the appreciation of music. About four years later she moved to Dallas and entered business as a blouse buyer and saleswoman at A. Harris and Company, a department store. She was a conscientious worker and by age twenty-one Carrie Marcus Neiman. Courtesy of the Jewish was among the highest-paid working women in Museum of the American the city. In 1905 she met Abraham Lincoln (Al) West. Neiman, and shortly thereafter they were married. Mrs. Neiman resigned her sales position to become a partner with her husband and her brother, Herbert Marcus, in a sales promotion business in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1907, the partners sold the successful enterprise for $25,000 and returned to Dallas to open a specialty shop for high-quality women's ready-made garments.

In the first advertisement, of September 1907, the three founders stated that Neiman Marcus would be a new fashion center for southern women and a "store of quality and superior values." Personalized service and customer satisfaction were paramount objectives of the partners. A woman of impeccable tastes, Mrs. Neiman often guided customers in their choice of

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 83 garments designed with simplicity and made with excellent fabrics and workmanship. As a buyer for the firm, she displayed a fashion awareness and an uncompromising demand for quality in her numerous trips to New York to buy merchandise. Along with colleagues Moira Cullen and Laura Goldman, Carrie Neiman helped to establish the store's high reputation in Dallas and throughout the nation. In 1928 Mrs. Neiman divorced her husband, and Herbert Marcus purchased Al Neiman's interest in the firm. Carrie Neiman continued to be a visible and vital part of daily operations. She encouraged the establishment of weekly fashion shows, fall fashion expositions, and, beginning in 1938, the annual Neiman Marcus Awards, given to designers for distinguished service in the field of fashion. After the death of Herbert Marcus in 1950, Carrie Neiman became chairman of the board and reluctantly agreed to the expansion of Neiman Marcus Building in Dallas. the store to suburban branches. Some 200 pieces of apparel from her personal fashion collection later became the basis of the Dallas Museum of Fashion, located at the University of North Texas in Denton. Carrie Neiman was a member of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas and the Columbian Club. She was devoted to her family, to the store, and to the preservation of high standards of service. She died of pleurisy on March 6, 1953, at her home, after an illness of several months.

Women Across Texas History Series 84 Georgia Totto O’Keeffe 30 By John F. Matthews

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe, artist, daughter of Francis Calixtus and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, was born at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15, 1887. By 1899 she had two brothers and four sisters. After her family moved to Virginia she attended Chatham Episcopal Institute, Chatham, Virginia, for two years of high school. In 1905 she attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1907 she enrolled in the Art Students League, New York City, where she was awarded the Chase Still Life Scholarship. After a brief stint as a commercial artist in Chicago in 1909, she determined to leave art as a career and returned to Virginia. In the summer of 1912 at the University of Virginia she was inspired to return to art with the guidance of the Arthur Dow Georgia O’Keeffe. Courtesy method of expression, as presented by her teacher, of Rufus W. Holsinger Alon Bement. The Dow method took her away Photography. from direct representation and into abstraction and the expression of feeling.

Revitalized, O'Keeffe applied to teach art in the public school system of Amarillo, Texas. From 1912 to 1914 she was supervisor of art in the growing Panhandle town. She came to Texas out of a sense of adventure and romance derived from Western adventure stories. The Texas plains, she said, left her "beside myself. The openness. The dry landscape. The beauty of that wild world." She was somewhat removed socially from her colleagues and in conflict with the education board over expensive textbooks, and the school system terminated her teaching contract in July 1914 over a salary dispute.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 85 O'Keeffe went to New York to study with Arthur Dow at Columbia University and in the summers from 1913 to 1916 taught art at the University of Virginia. In the fall of 1915 she taught at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina. She resigned in February 1916, after being hired to teach at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University) in Canyon in the fall of 1916. Though her aesthetic brought conflict at Columbia College, O'Keeffe determined to paint in an intensely individual manner. Her sketches in charcoal came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, the proprietor of an art gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Stieglitz, who had shown Picasso and Rodin at his gallery, saw O'Keeffe's charcoals as "the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while." After this positive judgment Georgia O'Keeffe not only became a popular instructor among the West Texas students but also returned to painting in watercolors. At least fifty pieces have been recorded as composed during her second period in Texas. Her painting in Canyon showed a marked move away from representationalism. Though her themes were taken from objects in nature such as the evening star, Palo Duro Canyon, and the sun rising on the plains, O'Keeffe's sense of freedom and love of the plains carried her works into the field of abstract nature expression. Her most famous Texas paintings include the Light Coming on the Plains series, the Evening Star series, and Painting No. 21 (Palo Duro Canyon). Another series, From the Plains, composed in 1919 and again in 1954, embodies her concept of "visual music," in this case the attempted conveyance in painting of the sound of cows lowing for their calves in pens along the railroad tracks. While living in Canyon, O'Keeffe corresponded actively with Alfred Stieglitz. He gave her own show in his gallery in 1917. In 1918, during World War I, she requested and received sick leave from West Texas Normal College. She recuperated from her illness at Waring, Texas, with friends and journeyed to New York City in the spring of 1918. She resigned her position in Canyon in the summer of 1918. Alfred Stieglitz became her champion in New York, and O'Keeffe emerged as a leading artist of her time, associated with other modernists such as Arthur Dove, Max Weber, and John Marin.

Women Across Texas History Series 86 On December 11, 1924, she married Stieglitz, who was nearly twenty-five years her senior and had been married once. She did not assume his last name, and the couple had no children.

O'Keeffe remained faithful to personal abstractions of nature, and, from 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz arranged exhibitions of her work at Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. O'Keeffe spent the summer of 1929 in New Mexico and painted with new inspiration. She bought a studio at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico, in 1940 and a house in Abiquiu in 1946 where she set up residence. Retrospective exhibitions of O'Keeffe include the Brooklyn Museum in 1927, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946, the Worcester Art Museum in 1960, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth in 1966, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1970. Red Canna, 1924 by Georgia O’Keeffe. O'Keeffe had no firm religious affiliations. She was a member of the National Woman's party. In 1972 she contributed a painting to raise money for the Democratic party. In 1977 President Gerald Ford awarded her the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. Art Critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote in 1924 that O'Keeffe's work came out of general American life and reflects "a spaciousness of feeling, sweep, tumult, and calm like the spaciousness of the ocean and the Texas plains she loves."

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 87 Meridel Rubenstein wrote in 1977 that the sparseness and isolation of the Texas plains allowed O'Keeffe to discover "her constant inner sources of inspiration and mode of working." In this she was like Van Gogh and Gauguin, who also needed privacy and the inspiration of a natural environment. Georgia O'Keeffe lived in declining health in Santa Fe for the last two years of her life. She died at St. Vincent Hospital there on March 6, 1986, at the age of ninety-eight. In 1993 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

O'Keeffe Texas Historical Marker.

Women Across Texas History Series 88 Mildred Ella Didrikson Zaharias 31 By Susan E. Cayleff

Mildred Ella (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias, athlete, was born on June 26, 1911, in Port Arthur, Texas, the sixth of seven children of Norwegian immigrants Ole Nickolene and Hannah Marie (Olson) Didriksen. Ole Didriksen was a seaman and carpenter, and his wife was an accomplished skater in Norway. In 1915 the family moved to Beaumont, Texas, where the children, with the encouragement of both parents, became skilled performers on the rustic gymnasium equipment that their father built in the backyard. Mildred Didrikson, who changed the spelling of her surname, acquired her nickname during sandlot baseball games with the neighborhood boys, who thought she Mildred Ella Didrikson batted like Babe Ruth. A talented basketball Zaharias. Courtesy of the National Women’s History player in high school, Didrikson was recruited Museum during her senior year in 1930 to do office work at Employers Casualty Company of Dallas and to spark the company's semiprofessional women's basketball team, the Golden Cyclones. Between 1930 and 1932 she led the team to two finals and a national championship and was voted All-American each season. Her exceptional athletic versatility prompted Employers Casualty to expand its women's sports program beyond basketball. Didrikson represented the company as a one-woman team in eight of ten track and field events at the 1932 Amateur Athletic Union Championships.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 89 She placed in seven events, taking first place in five—shot put, javelin and baseball throws, eighty-meter hurdles, and long jump; she tied for first in the high jump and finished fourth in the discus throw. In three hours Didrikson singlehandedly amassed thirty points, eight more than the entire second- place team, and broke four world records. Her performances in the javelin throw, hurdles, and high jump qualified her to enter the 1932 Olympics, where she again broke world records in all three events. She won gold medals for the javelin and hurdles and, despite clearing the same height as the top finisher in the high jump, was awarded the silver medal because she went over the bar head first, a foul at that time.

Didrikson received a heroine's welcome on her return to Texas. She had started another basketball season with the Golden Cyclones when the Amateur Athletic Union disqualified her from amateur competition because her name appeared in an automobile advertisement. Her family was badly in need of money, and Didrikson turned professional to earn what she could from her status as a sports celebrity. Never hesitant to capitalize on her own abilities or to turn a profit from showmanship, she spent 1932–34 promoting and barnstorming. She did a brief stint in vaudeville playing the harmonica and running on a treadmill and pitched in some major league spring-training games; she also toured with a billiards exhibition, a men's and women's basketball team called Babe Didrikson's All-Americans, and an otherwise all- male, bearded baseball road team called the House of David. Since golf was one of the few sports that accommodated women athletes, Didrikson made up her mind to become a championship player, and between engagements she spent the spring and summer of 1933 in California taking lessons from Stan Kertes. Her first tournament was the Fort Worth Women's Invitational in November 1932; at her second, the Texas Women's Amateur Championship the following April, she captured the title. Complaints from more socially polished members of the Texas Women's Golf Association led the United States Association to rule her ineligible to compete as an amateur, thus disqualifying her from virtually all tournament play. Didrikson resumed the lucrative routine of exhibition tours and endorsements,

Women Across Texas History Series 90 impressing audiences with smashing drives that regularly exceeded 240 yards.

She met George Zaharias, a well-known professional wrestler and sports promoter, when she qualified at the 1938 Los Angeles Open, a men's Professional Golfers' Association tournament. They were married on December 23, 1938, and Zaharias thereafter managed his wife's career. She regained her amateur standing in 1943 and went on to win seventeen consecutive tournaments, including the British Women's Amateur Championship (she was the first American to win it), before turning professional in 1947. The following year Didrikson helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association in order to provide the handful of professional women golfers with a tournament circuit. She was herself the LPGA's leading money winner between 1949 and 1951. In 1950 the Associated Press voted her Woman Athlete of the Half-Century.

In April 1953 Didrikson underwent a colostomy Group of women that created the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Babe Didrikson Zaharias is second to remove cancerous from right. Courtesy of the United States Golf tissue. Despite medical Association. predictions that she would never be able to play championship golf again, she was in tournament competition fourteen weeks after surgery, and the Golf Writers of America voted her the Ben Hogan Trophy as comeback player of the year. In 1954 she won five tournaments, including the United States Women's Open. Portrayed as a courageous survivor in the press, Didrikson played for cancer fund benefits and maintained her usual buoyant public persona, but in June 1955 she was forced to reenter John Sealy Hospital at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for further diagnosis.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 91 Medical treatment was unable to contain the spreading cancer, and Didrikson spent much of the remaining fifteen months of her life in the hospital. In September 1955 she and her husband established the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Fund, which financed a tumor clinic at UTMB.

She died at John Sealy Hospital on September 27, 1956, at the age of forty- five, and was buried in Beaumont. Didrikson's exuberant confidence, self- congratulatory manner, and cultivation of her celebrity status irritated some fellow athletes, but she was the most popular female golfer of her own time and since. She enjoyed playing to the gallery in her golf matches, and her wisecracks and exhibitions of virtuosity delighted spectators. She was voted Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press six times during her career. Between 1940 and 1950 she won every women's golf title, including the world championship (four times) and the United States Women's Open (three times). She established a national audience for women's golf and was the first woman ever to serve as a resident professional at a golf club. In 1955, a year before her death, she established the Babe Zaharias Trophy to honor outstanding female athletes.

Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias Texas Historical Marker.

Women Across Texas History Series 92 Bonnie Parker 32 By Kristi Strickland

Bonnie Parker, outlaw partner of Clyde Barrow, was born at Rowena, Texas, on October 1, 1910, to Henry and Emma Parker. She had an older brother, Hubert (Buster), and a younger sister, Billie. Her father, a bricklayer, died in 1914, and Emma Parker moved the family to "Cement City” in West Dallas to live closer to relatives. In the public schools Bonnie was an honor student. She enjoyed writing poetry and reading romance novels. At four-feet-ten and eighty-five pounds, she hardly looked like a future legendary criminal. In 1926 she married her longtime sweetheart, Roy Thornton. For the next several years, they suffered a tumultuous marriage; however, she refused to divorce him. Bonnie Bonnie Parker. Courtesy of worked at Marco's Cafe in Dallas until the cafe Getty Images. closed in November 1929. About this time Thornton was sent to prison for a five-year sentence. Bonnie had "Roy and Bonnie" tattooed above her right knee to commemorate her marriage to Thornton.

She met Barrow in January 1930. Their romance was interrupted when Barrow was jailed a month later. During this time she wrote to him pleading with him to stay out of trouble upon his release. In early March she smuggled into his cell a pistol, which he used to escape. He was recaptured in Middletown, Ohio, after a robbery and sent to Eastham Prison Farm in Crockett on April 21, 1930. He was released in February 1932, more bent on destruction than before; and Bonnie was more determined than ever to prove her loyalty to him, even to the extent of assuming his manner of living.

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 93 Upon his release Parker and Barrow began robbing grocery stores, filling stations, and small banks. In March 1932 Bonnie was captured in a failed robbery attempt and jailed in Kaufman, Texas. Clyde murdered merchant J. W. Butcher of Hillsboro on April 27, 1932. On June 17, 1932, the grand jury met in Kaufman and no-billed Bonnie, thus securing her release. Within a few weeks she connected with Clyde. Once again, they were on the run. The couple killed two officers in Atoka, Oklahoma, where they had attended a dance and were apprehended in the parking lot. For a while they swept through the Midwest and Southwest challenging the law in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Missouri. They gunned down a grocery-store owner Bonnie Parker and Clyde in Sherman, Texas, a citizen in Temple, Barrow. Courtesy of Getty and another law, Images. officer in Dallas. Law enforcement agencies from several states initiated a manhunt but to no avail.

The couple temporarily settled down in a small stone bungalow in Joplin, Missouri, with Barrow's brother and sister-in-law. Not surprisingly, they were rowdy residents, and the neighbors began complaining to the police. Suspicious that this could be the Barrow gang, the officers promptly responded. Upon their arrival they were met by the four inhabitants and a barrage of bullets. After a bloody shoot-out, Bonnie and Clyde escaped. They Texas Historical Marker. left behind two more dead lawmen and six rolls of Courtesy of Barclay Gibson Photography.

Women Across Texas History Series 94 film, from which many of the famous photographs of the couple came.

Bonnie and Clyde traveled constantly, throughout Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas. On June 10, 1933, Bonnie was burned after their car rolled over an embankment near Wellington, Texas, and was treated at a nearby farmhouse. Officials sent to investigate were kidnapped and later freed in Oklahoma. Near Alma, Arkansas, the two killed the town marshall. Later, their gang holed up in Platte City, Missouri. In yet another bloody face-off with the law, Clyde's brother was killed, and his sister-in-law was taken into custody. In January 1934 Parker and Barrow helped their buddy Raymond Hamilton escape from Eastham Farm, and a guard was killed. At this time the head of the Texas prison system and the governor hired former Texas Ranger captain Francis (Frank) Hamer to track down the couple. By the middle of 1934 Hamer and his associates had begun to follow Bonnie and Clyde.

One of the couple's most blatant murders occurred on Easter Sunday, 1934, on the Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. outskirts of Grapevine, Texas. According Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of to a witness, a Ford halted alongside a Investigation. public highway. The occupants of the vehicle, laughing and talking among themselves, tossed whiskey bottles out of the windows. When the two highway patrolmen stopped their motorcycles to check on the "stalled" car, the people in the car leveled guns at the officers and opened fire. Bonnie reportedly walked over to one of the officers and rolled him over with one foot, raised her sawed-off shotgun, fired two more shots, point-blank, at the officer's head and exclaimed, "look-a-there, his head bounced just like a rubber ball." Less than a week later, on April 6, 1934,

Volume II: Early Twentieth Century 95 Parker and Barrow committed their last murder by killing a constable in Commerce, Oklahoma.

Afterward they were in continuous flight, with law officers in pursuit. They drove into a trap near their hide-out at Black Lake, Louisiana, on May 23, 1934, at 9:15 A.M. and were gunned down in a barrage of 167 bullets. Bonnie Parker was found riddled with bullets, holding a machine gun, a sandwich, and a pack of cigarettes; Clyde Barrow, barely recognizable, was clutching a revolver. The car was taken to Arcadia, Louisiana, and the bodies were later delivered to Dallas. Thousands viewed the mangled bodies and the car of the legendary lovers. Finally, amid public clamor and hysteria, the bodies were buried in their respective families' burial plots.

Women Across Texas History Series 96