Meet Minnie Fisher Cunningham
This week's feminist foremother is Minnie Fisher Cunningham. UT alumna, adoptive mom, political strategist, and organizer extraordinaire, New Waverly-born "Minnie Fish" was a lifelong activist. Her father, a former Texas State Representative, gave her early training in politics by taking her to meetings with him. The pay inequity she experienced while working as a pharmacist pushed her to work for women's right to vote. In 1913, she reactivated the Galveston Equal Suffrage Association and began working for the vote. She became president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association in 1915. After the failure of a suffrage bill in the state legislature, she changed her tactics and worked to allow women to vote in state and local primaries. Texas passed such a law in 1917.
Cunningham and her fellow suffragists were such successful advocates, they became known as the "petticoat lobbyists." They persuaded the state legislature to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920. This success got her noticed, and she was recruited to go to Washington, D.C., to help in the efforts to get the amendment ratified nationwide.
After its passage, she continued her activism. She was a founding member of the League of Women Voters. Back in Texas, she ran against a Klan member for a U.S. Senate seat, and then was appointed to several offices, including the leadership of the Texas Agricultural Extension Agency and the federal Agriculture Adjustment Agency. She ran for governor in 1944 and lost, but continued to work for progressive goals and inspire young activists like Liz Carpenter and Billie Carr until her death in 1964.
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