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Click each illustration
for a larger view
Texas
farmers enjoyed unprecedented prosperity
in the first two decades of the 20th century.
With
the coming of the Great War, the support and cooperation of
women was universally recognized as being vital to the war effort.
Women and men alike on the home front found an outlet in volunteerism
and patriotism.
The
war solidified changes in women's roles that had been underway
in Texas since the 1890s. J.J. Farley was a captain in the Dallas
Police Department.
Marjorie
Stinson of San Antonio trained men for the Canadian Royal Flying
Squadron for service in France.
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The
Fall of Pa Ferguson
As Texas mobilized for the national crisis of the Great War,
the political crisis caused by the war between Governor Ferguson
and the University of Texas had only grown. The Board of Regents
had fired a number of professors who had met with Ferguson's
disapproval. The professors tried without success for reinstatement,
while students and ex-students staged protests at the capitol.
The governor was still not satisfied with the university's response
to his demands for change. In June he vetoed the entire legislative
appropriation for the university. Outraged alumni called for
Ferguson's impeachment, but the governor was unabashed. In July,
the regents complied with his wishes and fired the university
secretary and six more faculty members. Later in the month,
a Travis County grand jury indicted Ferguson on nine charges
of misuse of public funds and embezzlement.
The speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, F.O. Fuller,
called a special session of the legislature for August 1 to
consider Ferguson's impeachment. Although such a call was actually
beyond Fuller's constitutional powers, he was able to maneuver
Ferguson into calling a session to take up the matter of the
university's appropriation. As the legislators arrived in town,
so did thousands of farmers, drawn to Austin for the annual
Farmers' Institute, a convention at which farmers gathered to
exchange ideas on the latest in agricultural methods. "Farmer
Jim" saw the Institute's gathering as the perfect opportunity
to rally his constituents against the legislature.
But Austin women beat him to the punch. Jane Y. McCallum and
others organized a huge public demonstration on the capitol
grounds that reached legislators, farmers, and students. The
suffragists were joined by more conservative women who were
opposed to Ferguson. Under a huge orange-and-white banner reading,
"Women of Texas Protest," male and female speakers
spoke for a marathon 16 hours. As McCallum proclaimed, Ferguson
was the "implacable foe of woman suffrage and of every great
moral issue for which women stood." By reaching Ferguson's strongest
supporters, the rally helped turn public opinion against the
governor. Ferguson resigned from office on August 25, 1917.
In addition to removing one of the chief opponents of women's
suffrage, the Ferguson impeachment had another, unexpected effect.
As Minnie Fisher Cunningham noted, the exposure of so much venality
and corruption made it difficult for male politicians to look
the suffragists in the eye and tell them that they were not
fit to vote.
Profile: Jane Y.
McCallum (1877-1957)
 Jane
Yelvington was born in La Vernia, Texas. She married Arthur
McCallum in 1896, eventually settling in Austin, where
Arthur served as school superintendent from 1903-1942.
They had a daughter and four sons. She became interested
in women's suffrage and prohibition and in 1915 was elected
president of the Austin Women's Suffrage Association.
She also worked on the statewide campaign for suffrage,
lectured, and wrote a suffrage column for the Austin newspaper.
During World War I, she led Austin women in raising nearly
$700,000 for the war effort.
After suffrage was achieved, McCallum continued to be
active in the "Petticoat Lobby," working for education,
prison reform, prohibition, mother and child health, literacy,
and the elimination of child labor. She was a leader in
campaigning for Dan Moody against Miriam "Ma" Ferguson
in 1926, and became Texas secretary of state after Moody's
victory. While in office, she discovered the original
Texas Declaration of Independence, long thought lost,
locked in a vault in the Capitol. She served as secretary
of state until 1933. In later years, she continued to
be active in civic affairs, in writing about Texas women,
and in numerous other clubs and causes.
Photo from Texas Women's Hall of Fame, by Sinclair
Moreland. Biographical Press, Austin, Texas, 1917. Archives
and Information Services Division, Texas State Library
and Archives Commission.
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The Great War
The Ferguson battle might have been all-consuming for Texas
in the summer of 1917, but far more important events were affecting
the future of Texas and the nation. On April 6, 1917, the United
States had declared war on Germany, in part because of Germany's
efforts to stir up trouble along the Texas-Mexico border. The
entry of the United States into the most violent conflict the
world had yet witnessed would prove a final turning point for
the women's suffrage movement.
The militant suffragists of the National Women's Party vowed
not to let their work be interrupted by the war. They continued
to hold parades, demonstrate, get arrested, and chain themselves
to the fence of the White House. While these tactics made them
extremely unpopular with mainstream Americans, they helped the
suffrage movement as a whole by driving lawmakers and other
public opinion makers into the relatively moderate arms of Carrie
Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Texas suffragists participated actively in war work. They sold
liberty bonds, planted victory gardens, knitted and sewed for
the troops, and worked in Red Cross auxiliaries. Minnie Fisher
Cunningham organized an effort to improve moral conditions near
army camps. Other women took the place of men gone to war as
farmers, mechanics, munitions workers, nurses, and doctors.
The war work made a difference in turning public opinion in
Texas in favor of the suffragists. These were women who had
served their country in time of crisis. They were no longer
a fringe group but part of the mainstream of American society.
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