Jessie grew up in a household where politics was debated, and her mother Laura had always been involved in measures to help the community, first in Overton and then in Georgetown. But when Jessie returned to Georgetown after her husband Roger died, her innate sense of fairness and justice kindled quickly as she became a business owner and widow supporting three children.
Jessie’s mother Laura had taken over the Georgetown Telephone Exchange when her husband James died, and Jessie joined her in the business. The two widows became competent and tough-minded competitors in a male-dominated and often sexist business community. Recalled Jessie’s secretary, “Most of the men thought it was just terrible that she was trying to wear the pants.”
Jessie was outraged that as a business owner responsible for her employees and the sole support for her family, she wasn’t allowed to vote on the many matters affecting her business, family, and community. She started doing precinct organizing for the Texas Equal Suffrage Association or TESA. Jessie couldn’t agree more with their suffrage activism. After all, as this TESA flyer notes, “women need the vote for the same reason that men need it.”
In 1916, Jesse launched the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League with a first meeting held at her home, 1004 Church Street. Jessie was promptly elected its president. She knew that many Georgetown women were ripe for the suffrage fight. And Williamson County women had been part of earlier suffrage battles going back decades, joining suffrage sisters all over Texas.
Martha Goodwin Tunstall fought against slavery and for suffrage.
Suffragists had been fighting for the vote in Texas since 1868, the FIRST time that a suffrage measure was voted down in Texas. Several movements to get suffrage surged up over the mid 1800s and early 1900s. Meet just a few of the Texan suffrage sheros: Martha Goodwin Tunstall was a leader in the first attempt to pass female suffrage in Texas in 1869. She was also a dedicated anti-slavery activist in east Texas whose family was the brunt of ex-Confederate and Ku Klux Klan violence that included poisoning the family well and causing two of her children to die.
And here are the Finnegan femmes and mom (from left clockwise: Annette, Katherine, mom Katherine, and Elizabeth). From girlhood on, the sisters and their mother organized groups for suffrage in the early 1900s in the Houston and Galveston area.
Locally, women were forming thriving suffrage groups in Taylor and Circleville and Granger and other Wilco spots starting in the late 1800s. The Granger chapter, for instance, formed in 1893.
Lucy Stone fought for equality.
A Granger newspaper account reports that the chapter was named The Lucy Stone Equal Rights Association. Lucy Stone was the Massachusetts suffragist and abolitionist who advocated for things such as egalitarian marriage and advised that women keep their own names after marriage instead of taking hubby’s name. Women who did (and do) that are sometimes called Lucy Stoners.
Granger’s first female suffragist doctor
The chapter leader was Grace Danforth, Granger’s first female doctor. The newspaper noted that “as there is quite a strong equal suffrage sentiment in and around Granger, they propose to make it [the chapter] like the name it bears, a tower of strength for the cause.”
As the 1900s began, suffrage calls continued to grow. More women were joining the work force and going to college and vocational schools.
And for decades women across the board had been proving themselves more than ready to handle voting decisions. In Georgetown as elsewhere, they’d been honing expert organizational skills in women’s clubs, leading initiatives in their schools and churches. And they’d been continuing to work in political arenas for many issues, including the vote, like the Women’s Progressive Club of San Antonio.
Women’s Progressive Club, San Antonio, founded around 1910
Here and across the US, women were the backbone of supplying war relief supplies and support for the troops in WWI. Georgetown women spent endless hours, sewing hospital garments and knitting socks and gathering surgical dressing for Red Cross. They organized the schoolchildren to do Red Cross work. Women fundraised prodigious amounts of money. Wilco women, such as the Taylor’s new women’s voter league, helped raise the $800,000 in Liberty Loans gathered by the Texas organizer of the National Suffrage Association.
Women even went to the front, like this Texas woman serving food on the front in France.
Texas women serving at the front
Suffragists here and nationwide showed patriotism aplenty, like these suffragist nurses and doctors on the right ready to sail off to battlefields. They hoped that their dedicated work for the troops—and risking their lives—would be rewarded with the vote for women.
Women even (of course) volunteered during elections, assisting at polling places and serving coffee during elections. Women did so much to improve the community. Yet they were denied the vote.
Across the state, Texan suffragists faced formidable opposition. Texas governor James “Pa” Ferguson was a virulent opponent of both suffrage and the robust prohibition movement. Ferguson said of the suffrage “agitation sweeping the nation”: “Women across the country should be performing functions for which God Almighty intended her!”
Ferguson fulminates against female suffrage.
Ferguson had additional reason to hate on suffrage: He loved the money flow he got from the alcohol industry—including a gift (sometimes called a bribe) of $156,000 from a secret donor, which is a lot in yesterday’s—and today’s—money. Many other politicians enjoyed that liquor largesse. So since suffragists and prohibitionists had considerable overlap, these lawmakers responded by opposing suffrage. Women were more likely to vote for prohibition, so to the liquor lovers, women needed to stay away from the ballot box.
Even more opposition to women’s suffrage came out of racism: If women got the vote, that would include women of color.
Colquiett warns against suffrage because of “negro equality.”
Said Texas governor Oscar Branch Colquitt (governor from 1911-1915): “The question of surrendering our states’ rights is the important issue. When you give the ballot to women, you make it possible for negro equality such as you suffered in the carpetbag days after the Civil War.” The prospect of the federal government forcing female voting was a horror for Texans who’d hated the federal Reconstruction mandates.
Jessie was energized by the suffrage fight, writing a weekly suffrage column for the Williamson County Sun, in which she’d point out nonsensical realities such as this. By then, women were at times getting elected to school board and other offices by male voters who presumably considered those elected women quite competent. Yet the men don’t find women smart enough to vote?
Jessie delivered talks around the county to big and enthusiastic audiences. She’d race around the county and give, on some days, up to four speeches.
She packed the Taylor auditorium.
She was SRO at the Hutto Evangelican Lutheran Church. Which, by the way, looks exactly like it did over 100 years ago.
Hutto-ites loved Jessie speaking at the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Not a seat left at the Jarrell School auditorium (also looking the same).
Jessie became treasurer of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA). She found a good friend and mentor in TESA president Minnie Fisher Cunningham, who was growing TESA to its height of 10,000 members. Both Jessie and Minnie had felt the sting of inequity in the workplace. Minnie was one of the first Texas women to receive a pharmacy degree, and she learned at her first job in Huntsville that untrained male colleagues were making twice her salary.
Minnie Fisher Cunningham, friend and mentor
Minnie and Jessie strategized big and small on suffrage strategies. One PR campaign they devised publicized a set of photos of Jessie reading to her children in a tableau of domestic tranquility. This photo was designed to refute anti-suffragist rants that “only old maids, unhappy married women, and childless married women wanted the vote.” It worked—the photo ran in newspapers announcing that Jessie would speak or head a meeting on topics that were seen by many as controversial.
Jessie and Minnie joined with Texas suffragists towards the goal of getting suffrage just for primary voting. This first step could be achieved easier: by simple majority passage in the Texas House and Senate and the approval of the governor. In contrast, full woman suffrage necessitated amending the state constitution, which required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature, as well as voter approval. Suffragists figured that once primary suffrage was achieved, it would be easier to get full suffrage.
The top priority was to get anti-suffrage Gov. Ferguson out of the way. Suffragists documented Ferguson’s impressive corruption record, and they battled his attempt to defund the University of Texas. Yep, UT was bad because the UT president wouldn’t fire professors Ferguson didn’t like. When Ferguson vowed to cut state funds to UT, an angry coalition formed of progressive Texans.
Join the battle, drums a Baylor student suffragist!
In June of 1917, younger suffragists, students, prohibitionists, farmers, lawyers, and legislators sick of the corrupt Ferguson rallied at the capitol from dawn to dusk in a rowdy 16-hour protest.
University of Texas supporters rally against Ferguson.
Lieutenant governor Hobby accepts the quid-pro-quo from suffragists.
It helped turn the tide: Ferguson was impeached, and Lieutenant Governor William Hobby took over.
Suffragists promptly pressed Hobby to submit a bill for suffrage in primaries. They promised Hobby that if he did, they’d then work to elect him governor. It worked: The primary suffrage bill passed and went into effect in June 1918.
But there was no time for celebration: Passage meant that Texas women had only 17 days to register women in time to vote in the primaries.
Jessie and the Williamson suffrage supporters leapt into action. She conducted workshops all over the county teaching women how to register, and she held mock elections. The same energy radiated statewide, as women took to the roads to race against the voter registration deadline. Here’s suffragist Eleanor Brackinridge and friends about to rally the suffrage troops in San Antonio.
Suffragists on a roll! Brackenridge is looking out the near back window.
Knowing that women would have to travel a good distance in the summer heat to register in the county seat of Georgetown, Jessie got local stores to offer restroom relief for women . . . who might then do some shopping. This ad aimed to entice the women serving their country by registering and voting into the Stromberg-Hoffman department store—you can still see its building name at 8th and Austin.
As women poured into Georgetown by carloads and wagons to register, things were getting frantic over at the county courthouse in the tax assessor office, which at that time was in charge of voter registration. Director Halsey Davis was surely getting frazzled with all the registrations by women. Three more clerks were required to accommodate all the women.
Haggard Wilco tax assessors office workers
By the 17th day before primaries began, an incredible 3,800 Williamson County women had registered to vote. The statewide numbers were staggering. A tidal wave of 386,000 Texas women had registered. These happy voters are celebrating in Travis County, where 5,856 women registered in the 17 days.
Now the focus turned to getting the 19th Amendment ratified in Texas. The road was rocky, and the anti-suffragist shenanigans included trying to spirit Texas senators out of town to prevent a quorum—an effort that was headed off by suffragists at train stations looking out for legislative runaways. The measures seemed doomed several times; nevertheless, women persisted.
Finally, on June 28, 1919, full suffrage for women passed, making Texas the first southern state to pass the suffrage amendment! Here’s Hobby signing the amendment.
Suffragists loved to sing along to original songs about their cause, or they’d tailor the lyrics of an existing song. Sing along to this one, penned by victorious suffragists at the time, which goes to the tune of “Dixie.”
There is growth and grace in the land of cotton
Where women’s rights are not forgotten
Look away, look away, look away, Texas land.
In Texas land where man and woman
Are close akin in all things human
Look away, look away, look away, Texas land.
CHORUS
And they’re getting right in Texas
Hooray! Hooray!
In Texas land they’ll be on hand
For equal rights in Dixie.
Away! Away! Away down south in Texas!
Away! Away! Away down south in Texas!
The ink had scarcely dried on the suffrage proclamation when the TESA transformed itself into the TX League of Women Voters. State suffrage leaders got together at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio on October 19, 1919, and made the magic happen. Leagues started to spring up and the leagues got on with the business of voter education for women and all people. These women from the National League got one word for you. What’s that word? VOTE! Same one we’ve got at the Wilco LWV and at the 700-some Leagues nationwide!
National League of Women Voters women got a word for you.
Jessie was elected president of both the state and Georgetown league. The League began doing the same important work still done today: In its early years, the League of Women Voters conducted citizenship schools and held get-out-the-vote campaigns. They published extensive voting information, interviews with candidates, and citizenship booklets that are similar to the League’s current day Voter Guides.
The League carries on its biggest mission: Educating voters.
Jessie loved being a force in the political scene here and beyond, diving into state and national Democratic politics. She was elected a delegate to the 1920 National Democratic Convention in San Francisco. There she is in San Francisco with some other Texas lady delegates—Jessie is the third from the right on the bottom row.
Now, VERY unfortunately, what the LWV and other white women’s organizations sidestepped was the fact that women of color were NOT part of this new voting right for women. Texas women of color were cut out of the voting privilege in large part because of the whites-only primary voting rules of the Democratic party. This measure kept black people from an electoral voice because Texas was then overwhelmingly one party: The Democrats.
You may already know this, but the Democrats and their party planks of this era in the South were not the same as they are now. The Democrats were the party that typically represented the interests of white male elites, and most Dems were firmly in favor of segregation and disempowering people of color. So Black women and men were reduced to voting in the general election for white-picked Democrats OR for Republicans . . . who were virtually guaranteed to lose.
Minority voters also faced paying a poll tax—a fee to be paid when voting that not many could afford. And the poll tax was intended to keep out anyone but white people of means. In a special session, the Texas legislature had already passed a bill that said that in the event of women’s suffrage becoming law, a poll tax was a “protection to the state against possible influx of all kinds of voters.”
So when Black and Latina women—who had also worked hard for women’s suffrage—came to register and vote, they were turned away. Christia Adair and Lulu B. White worked all their lives for racial justice in Houston and elsewhere, and they encountered these roadblocks for years.
Christia Adair (left) and Lulu B. White
Christia remembers trying to vote in the 1918 primary. “The white women were going to vote,” she recalls. “And we dressed up and went to vote, and when we got down there, well, we couldn’t vote. They gave us all different kinds of excuses why. So finally one woman, a Mrs. Simmons, said, ‘Are you saying that we can’t vote because we’re Negroes?’ And he said, ‘Yes, Negroes don’t vote in primary in Texas.’ So that just hurt our hearts real bad.”
Christia, who died in 1989, is standing by a mural in a Houston park and community center named after her.
The NAACP—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—and other organizations battled to stop the all-white primary laws. In Texas, the all-white primaries were not overturned until a Supreme Court decision in 1944. Here’s Lulu B. White at center to the left of Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case for the NAACP and went on to be a Supreme Court justice. The poll tax in Texas didn’t end until after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.
Black and Latina women had been just as important in their communities as white women were, doing critical social welfare work in their women’s clubs, working and owning businesses, and advocating for female suffrage. One club, La Liga Femenil Mexicanista or League of Mexican Women, was started by fearless journalist and suffragist Jovita Idar.
Jovita Idar fought for women’s suffrage and defended her family newspaper press when it was threatened.
The group worked for suffrage, as well as better health and education for Hispanics. By the way, Jovita recently merited a park renamed for her, a nice big historical marker, and awesome mural in Laredo. Great ideas, aren’t they?
Kate Gordon
Most white suffragists were happy that women of color were working for suffrage—in their own groups. They did not invite them to join their white organizations, for fear that minority women’s presence would amp up fears of increased non-white voter power and endanger the passage of suffrage.
Some suffragists WERE overtly racist, such as Kate Gordon of Louisiana, who didn’t want Black women OR Black men to vote. These suffragists called for “states rights” to decide who voted, and they fanned the flames by pointing out that allowing white women to vote could help overpower any minority voting power. Gordon started the Southern States Woman Suffrage Association because she thought it unfair that uneducated Black male voters got the vote before educated white women. Gordon wrote that Southern women “have felt a special resentment in witnessing their government make their ignorant slaves the political superiors of the white women of the nation."
James. B. Wells
In Texas and other Southern states, anti-suffragists were frequently married to rich, powerful men who didn’t want to see suffragist goals such as equitable pay for women and children and other possible regulation that would lower profits. Pauline Kleiber Wells, head of the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, was married to James B. Wells, the iron-fisted boss of the south Texas Democratic machine who owned vast parts of south Texas. James predicted that if women got the vote, "No one on earth can tell how they are going to vote, or can control them." Pauline used the family money and influence to delay suffrage passage.
However, some white suffragists DID work hand-in-hand with black and brown suffragists. In El Paso, for example, Maude Sampson Williams founded the El Paso Negro Woman's Civic and Enfranchisement League in 1918.
Suffragist Maude Sampson on left
Maude’s group worked closely together with the city’s white suffrage club, the El Paso Equal Franchise League. Belle Christie Critchett of the white women’s Equal Franchise League urged Maude to seek admission for her group to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
But when Maude requested that her chapter become a NAWSA affiliate, NAWSA’s national president, Carrie Chapman Catt, directed Minnie Fisher Cunningham of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association to decline Williams’s admission. President Carrie said that Maude should be told that white suffrage groups "will be able to get the vote for women more easily if they do not embarrass you by asking for membership." When Minnie said that in this letter to Maude, she emphasized that when suffrage was won, it would benefit all women, including women of color.
When suffrage was won, Jessie and Minnie began marshalling women to join forces in their new poll power. The Joint Legislative Council was formed in 1922, uniting big women’s groups including the League of Women Voters, the Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Texas Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and the powerful Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. Here are Federation leaders in front of the Federation building that’s still looking good on San Gabriel and 24th in Austin.
The Council hammered out legislative goals, and when the 1923 session opened, lawmakers found on their desks a program including state monies for maternal and infant health; improvements for public education; prison reform measures; and more. In short, these women wanted to make good on the promise of Lady Justice in Texas!
Lady Justice can’t rest until women vote!
Condescending lawmakers dubbed these activists “the petticoat lobby,” but these women meant business. EVERY one of their proposals in that first year eventually passed! They passed, because women all over the state were on their legislators’ butts constantly, writing letters and submitting petitions and calling out hypocrisy. For example, when lawmakers said that accepting federal money for maternal and infant health would upend the hallowed “states rights” and foster “Communism, Anarchism, birth control…and free love,” the suffragists pointed out those lawmakers were delighted to score federal handouts for highways and agriculture.
Health for mothers and babies, even for more privileged women, was far from guaranteed back then. In the early 1900s, childbirth killed many mothers. Nearly one in three babies would die before age five. Bacteria in milk cans left out too long was often a culprit, along with polluted water and poor sewage and garbage disposal systems.
Many children died from milk that had gone bad.
Mary Brown wanted more babies to survive.
This grated on activist Mary Brown Work of Denton. She noted that when the boll weevil destroyed one-tenth of the cotton crop, the legislature quickly threw lots of money at remedies—all while they ignored the high infant death rate.
For Jessie, prison reform was a priority. Appointed to the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, she saw the awful treatment of prisoners on the state’s many penal farms, as well as the pork-barrel operating mode of the state prison administration. She’d seen prison labor close up since she was a girl, when convicts were forced to build railroads near her girlhood home.
Convict laborers on railroads near Palestine
Within the LWV, Jessie fought for women—and children—who were working. While the law forbade employment for children under 15, it exempted farm kids, who were 7 of 8 child workers. The state listened to the Joint Legislative Council and added oversight of these children.
And women’s wages then were abysmal: Many women worked for less than $5 a week in industrial jobs. Mexican-American women earned much less in the same position, and African-American women were often totally excluded from these jobs. A minimum-wage law for women passed in 1919 . . . and then was repealed two years later.
Jessie worked hard to expand women’s legal rights, such as equal guardianship of children and married women’s property rights. Often her efforts met a stone wall. She recalls a legislator who assured her that current laws giving men control of women’s pay and assets were chivalrous measures to protect women. Retorted Jessie, “Since an unmarried woman or a widow could own her own property, while the wages of a working woman were ‘community property,’ then as long as a woman is married . . . she’s feeble-minded, but just let the husband die and she gets her sense back, doesn’t she!”
Jessie knew how critical equal education was to the expansion of women’s lives, so in 1926 she helped found the Texas state AND Georgetown branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and became the first president of both. The AAUW women urged schools to offer the same classes and opportunities to women as those given to men. The Georgetown AAUW chapter continues on, and they named their chapter and scholarship program after—who else?—Jessie Daniel Ames. Here’s the AAUW women gathered a few years ago celebrating having the Georgetown mayor proclaim an Equal Pay Day!
Jessie enjoyed a new sense of purpose and pride in her widely praised organizing skills. But she also began to see the limits to her work for women. So many reforms she and other women proposed were denied for racist reasons. Legislators too often refused to approve anything intended for women and children because it would then include women and children of color.
Black women in restaurant work
She wrote that equal wage proposals and job training for women would be nixed because “n-word wenches” would be getting the same wages as “pure white girls.” Or that any programs to help mothers and babies would be blocked unless there were a guarantee that Negro mothers and babies would be excluded. Jessie decided racial problems must be a top focus.
Help for women and children: Only white ones, many legislators said.
Jessie’s political involvement also gave her a front-row seat to conditions for people of color in her own community and state. Jessie helped a friend and sister suffragist Mary Shipp Sanders win the seat for county school superintendent, an office never before won by a woman.
Mary Shipp Sanders
Mary, an English instructor at Southwestern University, teamed with Jessie to inspect the county’s schools for Black children. They found the conditions horrendous. In some schools, a single teacher taught as many as 90 students, in part because the state education funds for black children were being diverted to white students.
The Black community had been working toward a county vocational training school, and they gathered seed money toward starting the Hopewell School in Round Rock. Jessie and Mary were instrumental in securing a grant to build the school from the Rosenwald Fund, a program started by Sears & Roebuck founder Julius Rosenwald that funded more than one in five schools for minority students in the South.
Hopewell students 1937
Rosenwald funds also aided Black schools in Circleville, Granger, and Coupland. You can see the former segregated Hopewell—the Round Rock school district preserved it and uses it as a meeting space.
Hopewell lives on as a Round Rock school district building.
Jessie was also troubled by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s controlled the majority of the state’s counties and the machinery of the state Democratic Party. Klan parades mushroomed—here’s one in Austin on Congress Avenue. By 1922, Williamson County Klavern No. 178 had large open-air rallies and “barbekues,” appeared at local churches in full regalia, and routinely placed notices of events in the Williamson County Sun.
KKK rally in Austin
Dan Moody prosecuted the Klan in Wilco.
Jessie came every day to the county courthouse for the now-famous Wilco trial of the Klan, which resulted in a rare successful prosecution of the Klan by county attorney Dan Moody.
Several Wilco Klanners decided a white man was consorting with a widow woman, and as punishment beat him, chained him to a tree and whipped him, and covered him in tar.
A friend of Moody, Jessie offered him advice as the trial went on. Jesse would soon be a force in getting Moody elected Texas governor.
The courtroom where Moody got the Klan convicted looks much the same today.
Jessie got appointed as an anti-Klan representative to the state Democratic convention as well as the national Democratic convention in Madison Square Gardens. Jessie fought for an anti-Klan plank in the Democratic platform. But the pro-Klan contingent won out—and had to be stopped from burning a fiery cross outside Madison Square Gardens.
See what happened next in Jessie’s life in her next History!