Adele Briscoe Looscan: Daughter of the Republic by Laura Lyons McLemore (review)

In this fine addition to TCU’s Texas Biography Series, the author demonstrates that Adele Briscoe Looscan was indeed “literally and figuratively, a daughter of the Republic of Texas” (6). Her father fought in the Texas Revolution, and her mother’s family, the Harrises, numbered among Austin’s Old Three Hundred. To her mother, Mary Jane, and to Adele, both left fatherless at a young age, honoring Anglo pioneer days in Texas became a significant endeavor.

Born in 1848, Adele had a childhood and youth that were not without financial worries for her widowed mother, but she nonetheless attended Mary B. Brown’s Young Ladies’ Seminary in Houston and after her graduation in 1866 made extended visits to California and the Northeast. Further formal education was not an option, but by 1881, when she married attorney Michael Looscan, Adele was entering into “the burgeoning women’s club movement in Houston” (11). She would remain active in this movement until her death in 1935.

Mary Jane and Adele were key figures in the formation of the “Ladies’ History Class” in Houston in 1885. Soon reconstituted as the “Ladies’ Reading Club,” this organization would become an active force for civic projects and a charter member of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, formed in 1897. Mother and daughter were also indefatigable in support of the Texas Veterans Association in its quest to make the San Jacinto battleground a state park.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Adele, now financially comfortable and childless, established herself as an expert in nineteenth-century pioneer Texas. She published numerous articles in newspapers and literary magazines in the state. When the Daughters of the Lone Star Republic, soon renamed the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), was formed in 1891, Adele became the organization’s first elected historian.

Adele demonstrated an admirable commitment to the DRT through the stormy period in which Adina de Zavala and Clara Driscoll battled over preservation and interpretation of the Alamo site. The author provides a full and enlightening discussion of this division within the DRT, with Adele supporting Adina de Zavala through court battles and painful power shifts. By 1914, “she never again associated with the organization she had helped to found” (163).

In 1915, Adele learned from a Houston newspaper that she had been appointed president of the eighteen-year-old Texas State Historical Association. Her selection, unusual in an era when men still assumed leadership of those organizations in which they participated, was based upon her connections and “demonstrated devotion to Texas history” (1), as well as her well-honed organizational skills. Adele would serve a decade in this role, working valiantly to address the need for more members, more money, and more scholarship to keep the organization moving forward.

McLemore expertly addresses the ways in which Adele navigated and modeled public roles for women in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Texas. The author also shows that Adele approached the era she was commemorating with a more thoughtful, nuanced perspective than did many of her contemporaries, seeking out and sharing valuable primary sources in the process.