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  • Making Texas Our Texas:The Emergence of Texas Women’s History, 1976–1990
  • Nancy Baker Jones (bio)

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From the Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide 1941–1942 (Dallas: A. H. Belo Corporation, 1941), 90. Image used courtesy of the Texas Almanac, a program of the Texas State Historical Association, and accessed at the Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1i7i64/m1/92/?q=texas%20our%20texas [Accessed Aug. 26, 2016].

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In 1929 the Texas Legislature adopted “Texas, Our Texasas the official state song. For decades thereafter, schoolchildren literally sang the praises that filled its lyrics: mighty, wonderful, glorious, supremely blest, brave, strong, and mother of heroes.1 The last in this list was not unusual in civic discourse. Femininity and women’s images had long been equated with abstractions like liberty, justice, and freedom. Masculinity, on the other hand, was associated with the realities of public and political action. When women in the early United States pointed out, for example, that they were not included as citizens in the new Constitution, they were admonished to become “republican mothers”—to raise their sons to be good citizens. Women could not be citizens, only create them. In Texas, women were similarly ignored in both the republic and statehood constitutions as well as in the Constitution of 1876, under which Texans live today.2 [End Page 279]

“Texas, Our Texas” enshrined not only widespread acceptance of Texas’s masculine exceptionalism, but also its opposite—that women could not be heroes either, only create them. Public exploits were the duty of men and also the building blocks of history, through which pride in the song’s freeborn single star was handed down the generations. The assumption became explicit in the thoughts of San Jacinto and glorious Alamo of the second verse. Texas might be the mother of heroes, but the two most heroic battles in Texas history were accomplished by men: they had given birth to a free Texas. However subtly, “Texas, Our Texas,” confirmed the assumption that women were justifiably invisible, not only in public life, but in history: Texas was not really ours at all.

“Texas, Our Texas” survives as the state song in the twenty-first century. The practice of Texas history, however, has changed significantly as the gender assumptions underlying the song have evolved. Feminist activism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced a debate over women’s equal legal rights that, in winning suffrage, redefined citizenship. Similarly, as history evolved into a profession practiced by women as well as men, it also became contested ground, focusing debate on the history of women’s agency and their voice in the construction of the past.3 Much as early feminists used history to assert their right to citizenship, women in Texas seized on history in 1976, during the modern women’s movement, to assert their significance in the past as well as the present. By 1990, they had put in place four building blocks necessary for a new field: a cultural space, a historical narrative, basic research tools, and a collective identity. Their strategy was focused and direct. They took on the two largest purveyors of Texas history, the Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC) in San Antonio and the venerable Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia published by the Texas State Historical Association, founded at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where Texas history was first taught. Three milestones marked their progress: a major museum exhibit, the integration of women into the Handbook of Texas, and the first statewide history conference about Texas women. The context for these milestones was the slow evolution of an historiography of the state’s women, which continuously pushed back against male-focused standards of mythological and historical significance dating to Texas’s colonial period. In the process, they replicated [End Page 280] the dynamics of women’s ongoing relationship with history that Julie Des Jardins has explicated: transforming themselves from custodians of the past into historians; communicating the significance of the past to their children; managing public perceptions of history; researching, writing, and teaching...

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