ustxtxb_obs_1981_05_29_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

“homemakers without husbands” in It seems somewhat misleading to put early feminists like Ripley and McWhir ter in the same category with Parker and Starr. The formal catalog that accompanies the exhibit omits the section entirely. DESPITE such shortcomings as these may be, the exhibit is strong. The lives of Texas women are compiled in a manner that reveals the numerous con tradictions at work in those lives and celebrates the accomplishments of women from all backgrounds. Most in triguingly, this has been done in a fashion that brought together for the opening ceremonies radical feminists, liberal politicians, and conservative historians. That, in itself, is a significant victory. The organizers of the project are also to be commended for the twelve hon Mrs. Violet Greenhill, pioneer in licensing procedures for adoption agencies; Janis Joplin, the singer, who is quoted prominently; Adah Menken of Nacogdoches, an actress; Carrie Marcus Neiman of the Neiman family that founded Neiman-Marcus; Chelo Amezcua of Del Rio, and other artists, examples of whose work are shown; Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the late President; Mrs. Margaret Watson, secretary of the Texas Equal Rights Assn., who is quoted prominently; Dr. Mary Elizabeth Branch, president of TillotsonCollege in Austin; Annie Mae Hunt, a working woman in Dallas, whose poem is shown; and Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by the Comanches when she was nine, married a Comanche chief, and considered herself a Comanche. The 45 named in the back of the catalog Christia Adair, Houston NAACP leader; Cornelia Adair, manager of the huge JA ranch in the Texas Panhandle after her husband’s death; Daisy Emery Allen, one of the two women who first received medical degrees in Texas; Mollie Bailey, who ran a circus, alone after the death of her husband; Annie Webb Blanton, first woman to win statewide office in Texas, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1918; Mary Eleanor Brackenridge, leader in the suffrage and club movements, education for women, and mother and child welfare; Jane Cazneau, the only woman given an empresario grant to develop land in Texas; Sarah Horton Cockrell, a businesswoman who, after her husband’s death, built the first iron bridge over the Trinity at Dallas and a hotel in that city; Jeffie 0. A. Conner, leader in education and club work; Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the suffrage leader who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1928 and governor in 1944 \(and wrote columns for the Observer late in Anna Dupree, a Houston black woman who with her husband succeeded in business and gave to charities; Miriam A. Ferguson, Governor, 1925-27 and 1933-35; Annette Finnigan, suffrage leader and contributor of art objects orees invited to San Antonio for recogni tion on the opening day. A spirit of warmth and solidarity united such dispa rate women as Alma Gunter, a primitive artist, Mildred Dalrymple, an Air Force pilot in World War II, Enid Justin, a pioneer boot manufacturer, Ginger Ro gers, who got her start as a dancer in Texas, and Adair and Tenayuca. Obvi ous care was taken to express a wide range of experience and backgrounds among the special honorees. A thick bibliography on women’s his tory compiled by project historians is an invaluable resource for future work on Texas women. Page after page of com prehensive material points to the deep histories and rich experiences behind each symbol in the exhibit. A multitude of achievements and contributions are represented in the icons left, in particular, by working women and housewives. Project researchers hope that the wealth of material they have tapped for the project will inspire further work. to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; Maud A. B. Fuller, a leader in the Baptist Church for blacks; Edna Gladney, champion of unwed mothers and their children; Bette Graham, discoverer of Liquid Paper, an office product; Anna Hertzberg, clubwoman and first woman member of the San Antonio school board; Dr. Sophie Herzog, doctor and surgeon; Oveta Culp Hobby, who married former Gov. William Hobby in 1929, became commander of the WACs, was Eisenhower’s Secretary of HEW, and became publisher of the Houston Post when her husband died in 1964; Ima Hogg, daughter of Gov. Jim Hogg, oil heiress, benefactress of art and education, and with her brother founder of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at UT-Austin; Jovita Idar, an organizer, writer, and advocate of Mexican-American women’s rights; Lizzie Johnson, a wealthy cattlewoman who kept her property separate from her husband’s, active in WCTU and prison reform; Margo Jones, who had the theater-in-the-round in Dallas; Lucy Ann Kidd-Key, president of North Texas Female College for 28 years; Henrietta King, wife of the founder of the King Ranch who “frequently was in charge of the ranch and defended it from Indians and bandits while he was away” and owned it after his death; Olga Bernstein Kohlberg, El Paso clubwoman who instigated the founding of a kindergarten and a public library; Dona Patricia de la Garza de Leon, founder with her husband of Victoria and church patroness; Dolores Burton Linton, founder of a school for neglected black children in San Antonio; Jane Y. McCallum, suffragette, feminist, lobbyist, and Secretary of State from 1927 to 1933; Martha McWhirter, who led a group of 30 women into a program to stop taking money from their husbands and turn to menial labor, and who eventually left their husbands and set up a common home and finances and owned a chain of hotels, farms, and rent houses; Leonor Villegas de Magnon, a Laredo teacher, writer, and political theorist who sided with the Mexican Revolution and led a Clearly, a great need exists for such endeavors. At the festivities on May 9 Ann Richards, a Travis County commissioner who originated the idea of the project, spoke movingly of the “nuances and innuendoes” that keep women down. She emphasized that the sense of progress created by the exhibit will be only temporary if women and men together do not continue to actively work for equality on all levels. The exhibit is a call to continue the struggle to build a more equal society for all people. Emma Tenayuca and pecan-shellers, San Antonio city hall about 1935. band of nurses who cared for wounded soldiers and refugees; Jovita Gonzalez de Mireles, sponsor of the first bilingual elementary school program in Texas; Helen Moore, nurse, suffragette, and state legislator; Margie Neal, suffragette, publisher of the Texas Mule, first woman Texas state senator, and bureaucrat in New Deal agencies; Elizabet Ney, the sculptress; Rosanna Osterman, who brought the first rabbi to Texas and was a leader in the Galveston Jewish community; Katherine Anne Porter, the writer; Sara Estela Ramirez, Mexican-American feminist active in a group of exiled Mexican revolutionaries who organized MexicanAmerican workers for political action in the U.S., but died at 29; Melinda Rankin, founder of a religious school for Mexican girls in Brownsville, forced out of Texas because of, opposition to slavery; Kate Ripley, who with her husband founded a birth control clinic in Dallas when it was illegal to distribute contraceptive supplies; Helen Stoddard, president of the WCTU in Texas and an agent in legislation that set up what is now Texas Woman’s University in Denton; Elise Waerenskjold, journalist and feminist in Norwegian settlements in Texas; Hortense Ward of Houston, the first woman admitted to the Texas Bar and author of the Married Women’s Property Rights law of 1913; Edith Wilmans, first woman in the legislature, from Dallas; Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the athlete. In my opinion, there were two conspicuous and dubious omissions from those honored in the catalog: the late Mrs. R. D. Randolph of Houston, Democratic national committeewoman from_Texas from 1956-1960 and the first publisher of the Observer, and U.S. District Judge Sarah Hughes of Dallas. R.D. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 21 . :,,