February 27, 2004 UNT Inhouse publication: UNT professor finds that women’s civic clubs led to suffrage movement in Texas

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UNT professor finds that women's civic clubs led to suffrage movement in Texas

The Sept. 8, 1900, hurricane that struck Galveston left incredible devastation, destroying 3,600 buildings and killing an estimated 6,000 of the city's 37,000 people.

The tragedy, however, was the trigger point for enormous civic reform in the city by middle-class and wealthy women, which evolved into a woman's suffrage movement by 1912.

In other Texas cities, woman's suffrage movements began the same way — as routes to reform society rather than solely as symbols of equal rights for men and women, says a UNT historian.

Elizabeth Hayes Turner, associate professor of history, has been researching woman's suffrage and reform groups in Texas since the late 1970s. She discovered that very few historians wrote about Southern women, including women in Texas, after the Civil War. She has researched early-20th-century suffrage movements in Austin, Dallas, Galveston and other Texas cities.

"I originally wanted to see how women became involved in civic reform. It started in the 1880s when women founded orphanages and kindergartens and did other charitable work," says Turner, who is now planning to write a book on woman's suffrage in Texas.

In Texas, urban areas — defined by census records as populations of 2,500 or more — had immense needs for greater sanitation, paving, public services, child protection and education. Members of literary societies, which were popular clubs for women, became involved in voluntary public service, Turner says.

She adds that club membership and public service by women was limited mostly to cities.

"The lives of women in the Hill Country farms were filled with chores," Turner says. "Places where the work was constant and unrelenting did not leave women much time to be involved in civic reform. Middle-class and elite women in urban areas had more resources to take care of domestic chores, so they had time for other things."

The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs encouraged political and reform involvement among women in major cities across Texas, which by 1915 included the suffrage movement.

"At first, the suffrage associations held meetings in members' homes. It took awhile before they were visible," Turner says.

Austin women began the state's first suffrage association in 1908. Turner says that this group acted at first as if it were a charitable organization, sending flower arrangements to sick members, holding parlor receptions and sponsoring a disadvantaged child.

"Not surprisingly, one of the members put forward a motion to make their meetings more interesting," she says.

In Galveston, Clara Barton was a great instigator in the reform movement that led to suffrage, Turner says. The 79-year-old founder of the American Red Cross arrived in Galveston a few days after the 1900 hurricane and stayed for weeks, directing relief to those left homeless.

Galveston women who volunteered in the Red Cross formed the Women's Health Protective Association in 1901 to carry on Barton's work. Members replanted Galveston Island with trees and shrubs and formed committees to inspect and report on the conditions of streets, markets, bakeries, restaurants and housing, with cooperation of city officials.

In 1913, the WHPA conducted a sanitation study and discovered that contamination in the city's dairies led to a high infant mortality rate. This time, however, "the women had a very hard time convincing city officials to do anything," Turner says.

"They were frustrated because they couldn't vote. So most of them approached suffrage from the perspective of having more clout as a lobbying group if they had a vote," she says.

Seventy-four women and seven men became charter members of the Galveston Equal Suffrage Association. The association, Turner says, received support from Anna M. Jones, a Texan involved in the National American Woman Suffrage Association in New York. Pointing to the contaminated milk issue, Jones said that the "physical welfare and the moral uplift of the community" would be more quickly brought about "through the direct influence of the ballot in the hands of women."

In Dallas, meanwhile, women who were involved in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union became involved in suffrage movements to present a strong legislative lobby for prohibition, Turner says.

"Northern women used the same route to suffrage," she says. "Historians thought women in the South were mobilized by the WCTU, but the movement was not as strongly associated with suffrage in port cities like Galveston. Upper-class women in Galveston weren't very interested in prohibition."

Between 1912 and 1913, women in San Antonio, Tyler, San Marcos and Houston also founded suffrage leagues, with help from members of the NAWSA.

Texas, however, had a lower population of African Americans, making it important to the suffrage movement, she says. In addition, Texas Gov. William P. Hobby supported women's right to vote.

In 1919, Texas became the ninth state — and the first Southern state — to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. After that, the state's suffrage associations became Leagues of Women Voters, educating women how to vote, Turner says.

"Many women also worked for the voting rights of blacks," she says.

Turner now plans to study how the Mexican American population in Texas, which soared between 1911 and 1920, impacted the movement.

She says studying woman's suffrage has been rewarding for her.

"It's empowering to know that women could change the Constitution," Turner says.