Texas NOW Blog

Emma Tenayuca was a teacher, a labor activist, and a great community organizer. She was born in San Antonio on December 21, 1916. She grew up on the west side of the city, spending lots of time in church and in La Plaza de Zacate, listening to people preach the Bible, read the news from Mexico, and share stories. She started her activism early - girlfriend got arrested for joining a picket line of workers striking against the Finck Cigar Company when she was only 16 years old.

Emma founded two chapters of the International Ladies' Garment Workers. And in 1938, when she was just 21, she organized more than 10,000 pecan shellers, many of whom were women or children, to strike against their employers. It's odd to think about it now, but pecan shelling used to be one of San Antonio's major industries. So at that time, organized resistance against it was incredibly radical and a big change. This was also, according to historian Don Carleton, the first successful action in the Mexican-American social justice movement. The strike lasted a month and won higher wages for the shellers.

Needless to say, Emma was a very controversial figure. She was a lightning rod for conservative critics and a ray of hope for poor folks and Latino/as. She was jailed many times for her Communist beliefs and her involvement in protests and strikes. The tension culminated in what many have called the worst riot in San Antonio history. Emma was speaking to a crowd of Communists and labor activists at Municipal Auditorium when a mob of 5,000 people descended on the facility and began throwing bricks and stones. Chaos ensued. Emma received death threats and was blacklisted and unable to find employment - all this because she argued for things like Social Security, unemployment benefits, and the right to unionize, which we take for granted today.

After the dust settled, she left for California, where she earned her teacher's certification. She returned to San Antonio in the late 1960s, eventually obtaining a master's in education from Our Lady of the Lake University. She spent the remainder of her life teaching migrant children and continuing to inspire young activists until her death in 1999. Still beloved, she was known in the community as La Pasionaria de Tejas. As Carmen Tafolla said in her eulogy, "... She was our heart, defendiendo de los pobres [defending the poor], speaking out at a time when neither Mexicans nor women were expected to speak at all."

For more info:

• the Texan Cultures Institute's oral history interview with Tenayuca
• her bio at La Voz de Aztlan

Posted by Carrie at 5:25 PM | Permalink

Election Day is coming. So today I'd like to introduce you to one of Texas' pioneering female elected officials. Hat tip to The Princess for research and initial draft. I know, I'm lame, but give me a break, people! It's election season, and I'm busy! I'm in grad school and working for a candidate who I won't name, because Texas NOW can't endorse, but his name rhymes with Hark Drama.

Anyway...

Frances "Sissy" Farenthold, a Texas native, received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College, then a JD from the University of Texas Law School. In a student body of 800, she was one of only three women. After graduation, she worked as a field lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union from 1965 to 1967. She also served as the Nueces County legal aid director. Her work in both of these roles exposed her to a world of poverty and injustice that she had never known. Farenthold turned to politics.

She ran in several political races in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, she won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives representing Corpus Christi. She and Barbara Jordan were the only two women serving in the Legislature at the time. Farenthold was one of the so-called Dirty Thirty - the thirty House members who rebelled against a corrupt Speaker back in the early '70s. In fact, she sponsored a resolution calling for an internal investigation into the Speaker's shady financial dealings. Brave lady!

She was part of the organizing conference for the Texas Women's Political Caucus. In 1972, six women were elected to the Legislature, and the TWPC endorsed Farenthold as a gubernatorial candidate. Sissy lost, but TWPC remained active in politics and in 1973 hosted the first convention of the National Women's Political Caucus. At that meeting, Farenthold was elected chair of the national caucus.

Farenthold was also active in national politics. She served as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami and was nominated for Vice President of the United States. This was the first time a woman had ever been nominated and voted on for the position. She came in second, but her nomination proved that women were contenders for the top spots on the ticket.

Continue reading "Meet Sissy Farenthold" »

Posted by Carrie at 5:06 PM | Permalink

It's a sad day for Texas, especially for Texas women. Ann Richards, of blessed bouffant, died tonight in Austin. She was 73 years old.

Richards is the only woman governor of Texas to be elected in her own right; Ma Ferguson was elected only after her husband got booted out. Richards was the source of so many firsts: the first African-American on the UT Board of Regents, the first African-American and female Texas Rangers (the law enforcement, not the baseball team), the first disabled member of the human services commission. She herself was the first woman to be elected to statewide office in more than fifty years.

We've lost an amazing woman, a bright star in our political galaxy, a sharp wit and a big heart crowned by that fabulous Texas-sized hair. Our thoughts are with her family. Raise a glass of cold iced tea in her honor, folks, and remember her fighting spirit, her deep compassion, and her sense of fun.

We'll miss you, Ann Richards. Godspeed.

Posted by Carrie at 11:25 PM | Permalink

September 1 was Ann Richards' birthday. Happy belated, Gov!

It was also the birthday of someone you might not know - Liz Carpenter. Liz is often seen at political events around Austin, and she's fabulous. Can't quite place her? Here are some of her firsts:

• First woman to be vice president of UT Austin's Student Government
• First woman executive assistant to the Vice President
• First professional newswoman to be press secretary for a first lady

A sixth-generation Texan born in Salado, Liz's energy and wit have taken her fascinating places. She covered the Roosevelt White House for the Austin American-Statesman, including covering Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. She was a speechwriter for LBJ, most famously crafting his speech to the nation after President Kennedy was assassinated. She was press secretary and chief of staff to Lady Bird Johnson. She and her husband founded a public relations firm in Washington, D.C. President Ford named her to the International Women's Year Commission. She's a founding member of the Texas Women's Political Caucus and campaigned tirelessly for the Equal Rights Amendment. She was assistant secretary of education in the Carter Administration. She returned to Texas in 1976 and has been writing, speaking, and helping out younger folks in progressive politics ever since.

I'm tired just thinking about it, aren't you? What a dynamo.

And that's not all. She's a cancer survivor who's raised piles of money to fight the disease. She's still a very sought-after speaker, and she's written countless magazine articles and several books, including Ruffles and Flourishes, about her time in the White House; Getting Better All the Time, about her life before Washington; Unplanned Parenthood, about raising the three children of her brother, who died when they were 16, 14, and 11; and Start With a Laugh, a guide to writing good speeches.

Miss Liz has received every award and accolade under the sun. She's in the Texas Women's Hall of Fame, and received a 1977 Woman of the Year award from Ladies Home Journal, Distinguished Alumnus awards from UT Austin and from its College of Communications, the ProBene Award from UT's College of Liberal Arts, and the Frances Willard Award fromAlpha Phi. Her friends put together the Liz Sutherland Carpenter Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at UT, which has brought incredible speakers, including President Clinton, Betty Friedan, Fannie Flagg, Bill Moyers, and Maya Angelou, to campus. She is a true Texas treasure. Happy birthday, Miss Liz!

For more info:

• a day in the life of Miss Liz from the Austin Chronicle
• her bio and interviews with Evan Smith on KLRU

Posted by Carrie at 7:51 AM | Permalink

Christia Adair was a teacher, a community leader, and a tireless activist for the rights of women and African-Americans. Born in Victoria on October 22, 1893, Adair spent her early years in Edna, then moved to Austin with her family in 1910. She attended college first at Samuel Huston (now Huston-Tillotson University) and then at Prairie View Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M.) After graduation she moved back to Edna, where she taught elementary school.

She married Elbert Adair in 1918, and they moved to Kingsville. There she opened a Sunday school, and also began her community activism. She joined a multiracial group opposed to gambling, and then became involved in the suffrage movement. At that time neither blacks nor women could vote, and anyone who knows her feminist history knows that there was some racism in the suffrage movement. Indeed, after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, blacks were still turned away from the polls because of racist whites' tactic to deter them: the white primary. Since the South was wholly Democratic at that point, the primary basically decided the election. Thus excluding African-Americans from the primary effectively disenfranchised them. Adair had this to say:

"Back in 1918 Negroes could not vote and women could not vote either. The white women were trying to help get a bill passed in the legislature where women could vote. I said to the Negro women, "I don't know if we can use it now or not, but if there's a chance, I want to say we helped make it.

"We went to the polls at the white primary but could not vote...We kept after them until they finally said 'You cannot vote because you are a Negro.'"

This was a smart strategy, because that gave them grounds to sue. And sue they did. The Adairs had moved to Houston in 1925, and Christia had become very active in the Houston chapter of the NAACP. As executive secretary, she was a driving force behind the landmark lawsuit, Smith v. Allwright, which overturned the white primary - and helped set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.

Continue reading "Meet Christia Adair" »

Posted by Carrie at 6:01 PM | Permalink

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:

• her bio at HoustonHistory.com
• her entry at the Handbook of Texas Online

Posted by Carrie at 10:28 AM | Permalink

Mary Eleanor Brackenridge was born in Warwick County, Indiana, on March 7, 1837, the fourth of eight children. After graduating from Anderson Female Seminary, she moved to Jackson County, Texas to be with her family. After the death of her father, she and her mother moved to San Antonio in 1866, and that's when she commenced to agitatin'.

Eleanor became active in many women's organizations, including the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She re-organized the San Antonio chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and founded the Women's Club of San Antonio, where she served as president for seven years. Under her leadership the club worked to promote better education and employment opportunities for women, as well as the general welfare of women and children. During this period she also studied Texas law, and in 1911 she published a pamphlet, The Legal Status of Texas Women.

She was the first president of the San Antonio Equal Franchise Society. In April 1913, delegates from around the state met in San Antonio and elected her president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. She served one term, shared leadership with Annette Finnegan for a time, and then stepped aside. She continued to give her time and money to the cause. When the Texas Legislature granted women suffrage, she was the first woman in Bexar County to register to vote.

As if all that weren't enough, she was also a seasoned world traveler and an active participant in her family's business interests. She was one of the first women in the nation to serve as a bank director, holding positions on the boards of directors of the San Antonio National Bank and the San Antonio Loan and Trust Company.

Education for women was a lifelong passion. Eleanor was one of the founders of Texas Woman's University. She fought for its funding, often provided financial assistance to students in need, and even provided a cottage that served as an early dorm. She was Vice Chair of the Board of Regents for 22 years, from its inception in 1902 to her death in 1924. She also influenced her brother, George, "the guardian angel of UT," to promote equality for women. He did so with his considerable influence as well as his money; he provided countless scholarships for women and donated the money to build a women's dorm at the medical school in Galveston. In recognition of her contributions to the state, about a jillion things are named after her, including a dorm at TWU and a park and school in San Antonio.

For more information:

• her bio at Handbook of Texas Online

Posted by Carrie at 7:00 AM | Permalink

Ima Hogg may have had an unfortuate name, but she was one of the most respected Texas women of the 20th century. Born in the small town of Mineola, Texas in 1882, the daughter of a former Texas governor, Hogg spent her life and a considerable fortune working to improve educational and cultural life as well as mental health in Texas and the nation.

"Miss Ima" loved music and studied it extensively. In 1895, Hogg entered the Coronal Institute of San Marcos. Later in 1899, she attended the University of Texas at Austin. In 1901 she moved to New York City to study music, and continued her studies in Vienna and Berlin from 1907-1909. Hogg then returned to Texas, where she helped found the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which played its first concert in 1913. She became the president of the Houston Symphony Society in 1917.

Hogg was an extremely generous philanthropist. In 1929, she founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, which provided counseling for mentally ill children and their families. A survivor of mental illness herself, she founded the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin. She also donated the land and facilities for UT's Winedale Center, a division of the Center for American History and now the site of the acclaimed Shakespeare at Winedale program.

Miss Ima, often called, "The First Lady of Texas," held many positions of authority over the years, an enormous feat for a woman in those times. She became a member of the Houston school board in 1943, where she worked to establish music and art programs for area children and to institute equal pay policies for teachers, regardless of race or sex. She also regained her position as president of the Houston Symphony Society in 1946, and remained in that position for a full decade. In 1948, she became the first woman president of the Philosophical Society of Texas. In 1960, she was appointed by President Eisenhower to serve on a committee to plan the National Cultural Center, now called the Kennedy Center, in Washington D.C.

Hogg received many awards for her contributions to the community, including the Santa Rita Award, given by the UT system for contributions to higher education, and the Thomas Jefferson Award, given by the National Society of Interior Designers for her contribution to cultural heritage. She also received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Southwestern University in 1971, four years before her death from a car accident. Her work lives on through the Ima Hogg Endowment, the major beneficiary in her will, which funds children's mental health services in the Houston area.

For more information:

• her biography at UT's Center for American History
• her biography at LearningToGive.org
• her biography at the Handbook of Texas Online

Posted by Carrie at 1:10 PM | Permalink

Not long till school starts in this election year, so I'd like to introduce y'all to Hattie Mae White, a woman who achieved much in both politics and education.

Born in Huntsville in 1916, White moved to Houston when she was a young girl. She attended Booker T. Washington High School and graduated as valedictorian of her class. She went on to Houston Junior College and Prairie View A&M, graduating with high honors. She spent several years teaching school in different places, then moved back to Houston to marry Charles White.

White was deeply involved in her community. She served for six years on the YWCA Metropolitan Board of Directors, the first African-American woman to do so. She served on many other local committees and boards, including the Race Relations Committee of the Council of Churches of Greater Houston and the Administration Committee at the Blue Triangle Branch of the YMCA. She was also program director of Jack and Jill of America, Inc., and a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Association for Better Schools.

In 1958, White become the first African-American woman to win election to countywide office and the first person of color on the Houston school board since Reconstruction. Though Brown v. Board of Education had outlawed school segregation in 1954, Houston schools still separated students by race. White and other local Black activists, many of whom were involved with the NAACP, worked to change that. Vandals shot air pellets through the windshield of her car and burned a cross on her lawn, but White remained undaunted. In her nine years on the school board, she continued to work for desegregation. She was instrumental in US Department of Justice investigation of racial injustice in the district. According to her obituary in the Houston Chronicle:

White had to fight through the attitudes and barriers of discrimination of that day to give Houston's African-American community a voice on the school board. She did so ably, serving as an HISD trustee for nine years. White's stewardship covered the critical years when the district was moving from segregation to integration. Her leadership contributed to making that a relatively trouble-free process.

Continue reading "Meet Hattie Mae White" »

Posted by Carrie at 8:38 PM | Permalink

Running slightly late this week, sorry about that. But we have a great Texas lady to profile - Judge Sarah T. Hughes. She's best known as the person before whom President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in right after Kennedy was shot - that's her in the glasses in the famous picture taken aboard Air Force One. But really, that's the very least of her achievements.

Born in Maryland, Sarah attended Baltimore public schools and then graduated from Goucher College. She began her legal career working full-time as a police officer working primarily with juveniles, while attending George Washington University Law School at night. She was one of only two women in her law school class. In 1922 she married fellow lawyer George Hughes and they moved to Dallas, where he began a law practice and she began to run smack into the widespread discrimination against women in legal professions. She practiced law with her husband until she obtained a position with another firm. Not a great position, mind you - they didn't have a secretary, so they allowed her to use their outer office and threw a few cases her way. What a bunch of princes.

Hughes began to get more involved in politics, and in 1930 was elected to the first of three terms she spent as a state representative. In 1935 she became the first female district judge in Texas. In that position she fought for the rights of women to serve on juries and for juvenile justice reform. When she was appointed, one state senator publicly commented that, "She ought to be home washing dishes." She responded that the Senator probably would not hold his position "if his charming wife had been home washing dishes instead of campaigning for him." Sassy!

Continue reading "Meet Judge Sarah T. Hughes" »

Posted by Carrie at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

For more info:

• Cunningham's entry at the Handbook of Texas Online
• Her entry at the Women of the West Museum site
• An old campaign poster of hers
• Judith McArthur's biography of MFC

Posted by Carrie at 10:12 PM | Permalink

New Feature!

Every Wednesday we'll shine a spotlight on our Texan feminist foremothers. Why?

• Because women are consistently underrepresented in our history books
• Because we need to know how far we've come
• Because we can find inspiration for today's battles in those of times past
• Because those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it

To kick off the series, I'd like to introduce y'all to one of Texas' first feminists, Helen Stoddard.

Continue reading "Inaugural edition: Women's History Wednesdays" »

Posted by Carrie at 11:45 AM | Permalink