Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives ed. by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless (review)

In this new entry in the University of Georgia Press series Southern Women: Their Lives and Times, the editors argue that—historiographically speaking—the women of the Lone Star State are distinctive. Indeed, “Texans’ long-standing enthusiasm for their history meant that the state found early supporters for women’s history” (p. xiii). Thus scholarship on the state’s women is not as nascent as it is for some areas of the South. This volume’s essays examine familiar and unknown women, taking into account the heterogeneity that characterizes Texas. When applicable, the authors demonstrate their subjects’ agency in times when men largely circumscribed women’s status.

In the essay that frames Part 1, which covers 1600 to 1880, Stephanie Cole asserts that women had some social power during the initial years of Spanish rule. Next, Juliana Barr’s essay establishes that many Indian women served as the “go-betweens and diplomatic agents” for their peoples and the Spanish (p. 9). Jean A. Stuntz finds that Spanish women—regardless of economic status—occupied a space within the colonial world that entitled them to legal protections. Under Spanish rule, enslaved women had some rights, like the ability to purchase their own freedom; but once Texas gained its independence, Eric Walther argues, such freedoms were eroded. Rebecca Sharpless argues that many white women were better off, showing that daughters of elites could receive an ornamental and classical education at Baylor University during the 1850s. The 1860s brought war and an expansion of women’s roles, an experience that Angela Boswell finds was quite difficult for some southern women used to domesticity and subservience. Robin C. Sager argues that in the Reconstruction era some women in central Texas acted “as gendered participants” who “facilitated and aided the growth of cities through their own labor and capitalistic endeavors” (p. 129).

Women’s economic and political activism increased as Texas grew between 1880 and 1925. For example, Laura Lyons McLemore looks at an activist named Adele Briscoe Looscan, who served as president of the Texas State Historical Association and had “the longest term of any president of the organization at a time when women were just beginning to assume public leadership roles” (p. 151). Authors Ruth Hosey Karbach and Jessica Brannon-Wranosky explore women who fought for equality in the Populist and suffrage movements. Gabriela González reminds us that Mexican American women were part of the region’s landscape in her piece on Jovita Idar, an advocate who fought “to address the formidable challenges Mexicans faced in Texas” (p. 227). Judith N. McArthur explores how, in the aftermath of the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy, Texas mothers interacted with state and federal agencies to obtain the best care for their children.

The third section of essays covers the remainder of the twentieth century, a time in Texas that Rebecca Sharpless dubs “unique” but that nevertheless had “much in common with the rest of the United States” (p. 277). Such shared experience is evident in Victoria H. Cummins and Light T. Cummins’s piece on Frances Battaile Fisk, an Abilene clubwoman who “[advocated] for art and artists” (p. 281). Bianca Mercado finds that Latinas in Dallas during the era, while contending with multiple sets of gender expectations from their husbands and society, helped create “new models of womanhood” (p. 303). Kelli Cardenas Walsh chronicles the multiple roles Oveta Culp Hobby fulfilled over her adult life in the journalistic, military, and political worlds, transcending society’s gender norms. Renee M. Laegreid finds that female rodeo performers could take advantage of increased opportunities for women after World War II while not challenging traditional gender roles. Harold L. Smith’s essay on activist Casey...