SHE DID IT HER WAY
Born in 1892, when females were not expected to have a career, Waldine Amanda Tauch received encouragement to draw from her father who was a photographer. He allowed her to copy his photographs. In an interview conducted in the early 1980s, Waldine said that the day before she started school in Schulenberg, someone showed her […]
“Don’t Sell A Woman Short”
The Burnet County Historical Commission tells a tale that’s worth repeating. Ophelia Geraldine Crosby Harwood won the election for mayor of Marble Falls on April 2, 1917, three years before women received the right to vote. The all-male electorate gave her seventy-nine votes to defeat a popular local rancher’s thirty-three votes. When she was born […]
Mary, A Texas Maverick
She came to Texas as the young wife of a powerful man, and the diary she kept of her travels and her life in the growing republic has captured historians and lovers of Texas history. Mary Ann Adams Maverick (1818-1898) was born on a plantation in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. She attended a nearby boarding school […]
Feminist/Folk Artist
“Are They Real Men?” Alicia Dickerson Montemayor, a Mexican American feminist of the 1930s, actually asked that question in an article in the LULAC News in March 1938. Montemayor was challenging what she viewed as gender discrimination and machismo in LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), the oldest Hispanic civil rights group in the […]
Power of Black Women
Black women have received little attention for the critical role they have played in maintaining their families and contributing to their communities. After running across a brief reference to Rachel Whitfield (1814-1908) a “former slave who made it on her own as head of a household, subsistence farmer,” I found Rachel’s story in Women in […]
A 19th CENTURY WOMAN OF INFLUENCE
Jane McManus Storm Cazneau was born in Troy, New York, in 1807. After a failed marriage and being named as Aaron Burr’s mistress in his divorce, she came to Texas in 1832 with her brother Robert McManus in an attempt to improve the family’s shrinking fortune. Although she received a contract to settle families in […]
“A Happy Home Without Husbands”
“Charismatic, religious, smart-as-a-whip, trouble-maker”—descriptions applied to Martha McWhirter, who moved into Belton after the Civil War with her husband George and their twelve children. George opened a mercantile business, they built a large limestone house and the couple, active Methodists, attended the non-denominational Union Sunday School. Martha organized a weekly women’s Bible study and prayer […]
Three Women Legally Executed in Texas
Josefa “Chapita” Rodriguez lived in a lean-to shack near an ancient road that crossed the Nueces River north of Corpus Christi. She offered meals and a cot on her front porch to travelers along the route. During the Civil War, the trail was known as the Cotton Road because the Confederacy used it to move […]
A Texas Frontier Woman
Elizabeth Ann Carter Sprague FitzPatrick Clifton knew tragedy long before October 13, 1864, when 700 Kiowa and Comanche warriors tore through Young County in what became known as the Elm Creek Raid. At the age of sixteen in 1842, Elizabeth married a free black man in Alabama. She moved with his family to Texas where […]
Legends of A Lady Pioneer
Two official Texas historical markers sit on the shore of Lake Texoma, the enormous reservoir separating North Texas and Oklahoma. One marker commemorates Holland Coffee’s Trading Post, now under the waters of Lake Texoma. The neighboring marker calls Sophia Coffee Porter a Confederate Lady Paul Revere. The colorful lives of Sophia and Holland Coffee came […]