AUSTIN, Texas — Texas has a rich history of women in politics making history. From governors to first ladies to journalists, there are a lot of women who have made their mark on the Lone Star State and beyond.
For Women's History Month, Spectrum News 1 is looking at important women in Texas history.
Miriam “Ma” Fergurson
The first woman elected governor of Texas did so under unusual circumstances.
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson was the wife of Texas Gov. James E. Ferguson, who was impeached, convicted and removed from office during his second term in 1917 for actions he took against the University of Texas at Austin.
After James Ferguson was removed from office, Ma Ferguson ran for governor in 1924 and said she would consult her husband in the position, or as she would call it, “two governors for the price of one,” according to the Texas State Historical Association.
In 1924, Ma Ferguson became the first female governor in the state. She was almost the first woman governor in the U.S., but Wyoming Gov. Nellie Tayloe Ross beat her by 15 days.
Ma Ferguson lost in 1926 to state Attorney General Dan Moody in a runoff election, but she would be back in the position in 1932.
She died at 86 in 1961 and is buried at the Texas State Cemetery.
The all-women Texas Supreme Court
An interesting fact you may not know, Texas held the first all-woman supreme court in the United States in 1925.
Three women made up a special Texas Supreme Court for five months, after they were appointed Gov. Pat Neff. They were Hattie Leah Henenberg, Ruth Virginia Brazzil and Hortense Sparks Ward. All three of them were lawyers, and Ward was the first woman to pass the state bar exam.
The court was convened to hear a case involving the Woodmen of the World (WOW), which was a fraternal organization that involved almost all elected politicians and lawyers in the state. Because of this, judges and lawyers statewide had to recuse themselves from the case, including all the members of the Texas Supreme Court in 1924.
According to the Texas Almanac, Neff for 10 months tried to find male replacements for the court, but he couldn’t find any man who was not a member of WOW.
A week before the case was heard, Neff appointed the three women to the bench on Jan. 1, 1925, just a couple of weeks before Ma Ferguson was sworn in as the first female governor of Texas. Women in Texas had won the right to vote seven years prior.
According to the Texas Almanac, “The Dallas Morning News reported on Friday, Jan. 2, 1925, ‘All records were shattered and at least three precedents established on Thursday, when Gov. Neff appointed a special Supreme Court composed entirely of women. It was a healthy New Year gift of recognition to the woman barrister of today. This is the first instance a woman has been appointed to sit on the supreme bench; it is the first time a higher court is to be composed entirely of women and it is the initial case where a majority of the judges will be women.’”
The court upheld the decision of the El Paso Court of Appeals in a unanimous decision. They ruled in favor of WOW stating that their verbal “secret trust” allowed them ownership of two tracts of land in West Texas.
With their opinions written, the court disbanded and headed for the history books.
Barbara Jordan
If you’ve ever flown from the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, you may have seen the name Barbara Jordan throughout the airport. That’s because the main terminal is named after the former Democratic congresswoman, who was a state senator from Houston, and served three terms in Congress.
In 1966, Jordan became the first African American member of the Texas Senate since 1883 and the first woman ever elected to it. She remained in that chamber until 1972, when she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Jordan rose to public prominence during the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, while she served on the House Judiciary Committee, and she gave the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. She would later give the keynote address again at the convention in 1992.
After leaving Congress in 1979, she took a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, where she taught until her death in 1996 at 59.
Barbara Bush
Speaking of famous Barbaras, Barbara Bush was the wife of George H. W. Bush, and she was first and second lady when her husband was president and vice president.
She founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, a nonprofit foundation based out of Washington D.C. that has made a lasting impact on literacy across the country.
Barbara Bush started the foundation when her husband was president, and she called childhood and adult literacy “the most important issue we have.”
President George H.W. Bush signed the National Literacy Act on July 25, 1991, which offered millions of adults in the U.S. “the opportunity and resources necessary to return to education and earn their high school diplomas,” according to the foundation’s website.
The foundation has been run by Barbara Bush’s daughter, Dorothy Bush Koch, as honorary chair since 2012.
While she is not a Texas native, she moved to Texas in 1948 and died in Houston, Texas, in 2018 at 92.
Laura Bush
Someone who continued Barbara Bush’s legacy of helping increase literacy in America was her daughter-in-law and former first lady Laura Bush.
Laura Bush is the wife of former President George W. Bush, and she has her own connection to reading. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in library science and became a librarian.
Her husband was elected governor of Texas in 1994, and as first lady of Texas, some of her initiatives were health, education and literacy. After one term as governor of Texas, George W. Bush was elected president in 1999, and Laura Bush took her initiatives to the White House.
She established the National Book Festival in 2001 and encouraged education on a global scale. She also created the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries, a grant program that provides money to school libraries across the country.
“In May 2022, the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries awarded $1.5 million in library grants to 300 school libraries from 44 states across the country,” the program’s website said.
Even after her husband’s two terms as president, Laura Bush has continued to help libraries and schools across Texas. Multiple schools and public libraries have now been named after the former librarian.
Lady Bird Johnson
Another famous Texan who was first lady was Lady Bird Johnson, who was the wife of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Claudia Alta Johnson, who was better known as Lady Bird, was a native Texan, and she was known for her love of flowers and environmental advocacy.
As first lady, she planted thousands of flowers in Washington D.C. and lobbied Congress to pass different environmental initiatives, including the Highway Beautification Act.
The Washington Post called her the “patron saint to the National Park Service” in an article following her death in 2007 at 94.
After LBJ left the White House, the family came home to Austin, and Lady Bird Johnson continued with her green thumb by creating the National Wildflower Research Center.
One of her most recognizable achievements was the creation of hiking and biking paths and trails in Austin, which led to the city renaming Town Lake to Lady Bird Lake after her death.
Ann Richards
If you are from Texas or have lived here long enough, you know the name Ann Richards. Her legacy is felt everywhere, from the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders in Austin to the Broadway play “ANN,” and she lives on even after her death in 2006 at the age of 73.
Richards was the second female governor of Texas and was elected to the position in 1990 as a Democrat. She served one term in that office from 1991 to 1995, after she lost to George W. Bush in the 1994 gubernatorial election.
Richards was known for her brash and outspoken nature and had some quotable moments. One of those such moments was during her keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, where she said, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
Richards was the treasurer of Texas, and her convention speech catapulted her to national recognition and led to her rise to Texas governor.
Even after her time as governor, Richards continued to rewrite the history books. She wanted to highlight the importance of women that had been overlooked in Texas history.
One of her major contributions to Texas women in history was helping to create the Texas Women’s History Project in 1978, alongside the next person on this list.
“With Sarah Weddington and four other friends, Richards formed the Texas Women’s History Project in 1978 to research and reveal the women’s history that had been omitted from the show,” according to the project’s website.
Sarah Weddington
Sarah Weddington is a well-known Texas lawyer and state representative who helped create the Texas Women’s History Project.
While Weddington’s name may be familiar to Texans, she recently became even more well-known after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a case she argued and won back in 1973.
Weddington was a graduate of the University of Texas Law School in 1967, and shortly after, joined a group of graduate students at her alma mater in researching ways to challenge anti-abortion statutes. That was when Norma McCorvey, who would be later known as Jane Roe in court, was directed to her after she couldn’t get an abortion in Texas.
Weddington and Linda Coffee, her co-counsel, sued the Dallas district attorney at the time for enforcing an anti-abortion statute. They made their way to the Supreme Court, and appeared before the country’s highest court in 1971 and 1972 with Roe v. Wade, which was Weddington’s first legal case. She was 26.
In 1973, the court sided with Weddington and overturned Texas’ abortion law, legalizing abortion throughout the U.S.
Weddington later became a Texas House member from 1973 to 1977, representing Austin as a Democrat. In 1979, she was tapped by then President Jimmy Carter as the White House Director of Political Affairs.
She died at her home in Austin on Dec. 26, 2021. She was 76.
Molly Ivins
Known for her satirical writing, Molly Ivins was a liberal Texas political reporter who worked for the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Observer in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Ivins also gained national prominence writing op-eds for the Washington Post and New York Times. She even wrote Elvis Presley’s obituary for the New York Times. She later worked for the Dallas Times Herald in 1982. When that newspaper was bought and shut down by The Dallas Morning News in 1991, she moved on to write for the Fort-Worth Star Telegram.
Ivins died in 2007 after a long battle with breast cancer, but her legacy lives on as a firebrand in the political journalism world.
A documentary about Ivins called “Raise Hell” was released in 2019, and NPR reported on it by calling Ivins’ approach to Texas government reporting “like a flamethrower through a cactus patch.”
Former President George W. Bush, whom Ivins particularly beat up on in her articles, said in a statement after her death, “I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment will be missed.”