Meet Annette Finnigan
Native Texan Annette Finnigan was a businesswoman, a philanthropist, and a vital force for women's suffrage. She was born in 1873 in West Columbia, Texas. When she was three her family moved to Houston, where she attended public schools. A successful student, she went on to Tilden Seminary in New Hampshire and college at Wellesley. She spent considerable time in New York, as her family's business interests took them there. There she studied philosophy at Columbia and worked as an assistant to her father.
Annette came back to Houston in 1903. She and her sisters, Elizabeth and Katherine, worked together to form suffrage leagues in Houston and Galveston - the first such organizations in the state. They also started the statewide organization, the State Woman Suffrage League; Annette served as president. The family business took them back to New York, and without their energetic organizing, the suffrage organizations lapsed into relative inactivity. But when Finnigan's father died four years later and she took over the business, she began dividing her time between New York City and Houston. When she was in Texas, she was organizing.
Finnigan revived the Houston suffrage league and with her sisters helped organize a 1913 suffrage march. From 1914-1916 she shared the presidency of the Texas Woman Suffrage Association with Mary Eleanor Brackenridge. They pushed for a statewide referendum on a constitutional amendment which would grant suffrage to women. She moved to Austin to lobby for the amendment. It passed the House, but not the Senate. Though the push for the amendment was not successful, it greatly increased the profile of the cause of women's right to vote and put state officials on notice that this issue was not going away. The suffrage bill passed three years later.
In 1916, after contracting a serious illness involving paralysis, Finnigan was forced to adopt a less strenuous lifestyle. She gave up her business and political activities and focused more on her interests in world travel and in collecting art, rare books, and antiques. She spent most of the year in New York City, but wintered in Houston, which she always considered her home. She gave generously to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Houston Public Library, consulting with curators and doing extensive research before traveling abroad to acquire artifacts. One of her last gifts to the City of Houston was an 18-acre plot of land in the Fifth Ward for a "Negro park." This gift was a symbol of her support of African-American rights - note that it was made during the oppressive Jim Crow period.
Finnigan was diagnosed with cancer in 1940 and died soon after. She was buried in Houston's Glenwood Cemetary.
For more info: