Texas Left: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Liberalism

Not Whistling Dixie: Women’s Movements and Feminist Politics

NOT WHISTLING DIXIE Women’s Movements and Feminist Politics Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith Texas being such a big state, “it actually contains several different cultures. They are all rotten for women,” the late Molly Ivins once deadpanned in an article for Ms. magazine. Throughout most of the twentieth century the culture that progressive women struggled against was the southern one that Texas shared with the other states of the former Confederacy. That culture denied black women civil rights and threatened their lives if they resisted white repression . It held white women “hostage to the lost Cause,” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler’s phrase, disfranchising black men in the name of protecting white womanhood. Conservative southern men grounded their politics in patriarchal dominance, rejecting the concept of female moral authority that northern Republican women used to claim a role in public affairs, and resisting extensions of government power—especially federal power—as encroachments on white men’s rights and authority over their households.1 The removal of black men from politics left black women without even the “indirect influence” on the ballot that white women supposedly could exert in private on their men. At the same time, by making public space “safe” for white women, black disfranchisement opened the way for them to assume public roles and pursue social reforms and the vote, although not without trailing their skirts in the racial mud. The force and bitterness of the opposition that progressive women encountered shaped their tactics and rhetoric in ways that made them appear complicit in maintaining white supremacy— and indeed the majority shared the racial attitudes of their white op- 134 McArthur and Smith ponents. But as Suzanne Lebsock has pointed out in a seminal study of Virginia suffragists, historians need to examine southern women’s behavior bifocally. Viewed through the lens of the egalitarian present , they are undeniably flawed, but getting an accurate image also requires “a second lens for distance” that locates them “on a political spectrum that would have been meaningful to white southerners at the time.”2 Examined through this second lens, the definition of the political Left is situational and regional. Where conservatism is pervasive and powerful, moving to the center is perceived—and decried— as a leftward tilt. Attitudes and activities that northerners would have judged moderate were denounced as radicalism in the patriarchal and racially polarized South. Accordingly, we define the female Left in Texas as those women who stood in opposition to the dominant culture and its supporting pillars: restricted democracy and white male supremacy; cheap, limited government; unfettered, low-wage capitalism ; and traditional gender and racial norms. Race and class markers shaped feminist practice. Women who were white and middle-class saw their struggle in straightforward gender terms. While they contended against male privilege, they also bene- fited from access to the influence and financial resources of powerful men. For women of color, who lived and worked with men who were also exploited, campaigns for gender equality were intertwined with the pursuit of racial justice. Among African American women, female assertiveness has been termed “womanism,” a pursuit of empowerment for the race, female and male alike.3 Wage-earning women had still another perspective: “labor feminists” sought economic independence and union recognition in alliance with blue-collar men, as well as demanding an equitable share of leadership positions alongside them. Organized women were early and skilled practitioners of interest-group politics, and they challenged power structures through a variety of means—female voluntary associations, gender-integrated reform organizations, radical minority parties, and the left wing of the Democratic Party—in pursuit of expanded democracy and a more just and inclusive state. SUFFRAGE Woman suffrage got a late and fitful start in the hostile South; in Texas no state organization existed until the Texas Equal Rights Association (tera) formed in 1893. Many of the organizers were members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu), which had endorsed suffrage as a “home protection” ballot in 1888. The tera failed to thrive, and was defunct by 1896. Annette Finnigan of Houston next Women’s Movements and Feminist Politics 135 took up the cause and founded the Texas Woman Suffrage Association , which functioned from 1903 to 1905 and lapsed into inactivity when Finnigan moved to New York City. Revived in 1913 by Eleanor Brackenridge, and conjoined with the Progressive-era women’s social reform movement...