Women’s place is in the House — and the Senate.
Currently on display until May 22 at the Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum, 315 W. Ave. B, is a traveling photo exhibit, “The Changing Face of Power: Women in the U.S. Senate.”
The exhibit is timely as Bell County’s League of Women Voters currently is recruiting volunteers for the countywide National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 17, held in conjunction with the Bell County Elections Office. The League promotes no political candidate; rather, its mission is to inform voters of the issues and candidates, and to register people to vote.
The League’s next planning meeting will be 5:30 p.m. May 13 at Christ Episcopal Church, 300 N. Main St., Temple. More information about the League is available by contacting president@lwvbellcounty.org.
The latent message of the Railroad and Heritage Museum is a powerful one:
Give women the vote, and changes happen.
Women began working for poll privileges in the late 1800s. The Texas Equal Rights Association, organized in 1893 in Dallas, had active auxiliaries in Belton and Temple. As a result, suffrage news began regularly appearing in Temple and Belton newspapers.
Temple’s League of Women Voters began in 1912 with 21 wives and daughters of prominent men — ministers, bankers, factory owners, attorneys, judges and businessmen. Soon, 23 more women joined them; then, more than 100.
The dilemma: They couldn’t vote to win the vote; they needed men to vote in their favor. So, they buttonholed more prominent men in town to support their cause.
Although the state’s first woman governor, Miriam Wallace Ferguson (1875-1961), had deep Bell County roots, critics derided her as gaining power on her husband’s coattails and his corrupt political machinations.
Her husband, disgraced Gov. James Ferguson (1871-1944), was at first against women’s suffrage. Then, when he realized he could stay in power dangling on his wife’s apron strings, he was for it.
Not everyone was in favor of their advocacy. The Temple Daily Telegram in 1915 called voting “the white man’s burden of government” and editorialized that women were not intelligent enough to bear the responsibility.
Nevertheless, the women prevailed. They earned the right to vote in state and local elections in 1918, followed by the ratification of the 19th Constitutional amendment in 1920. Texas was the first of the former Confederate states to grant women the vote.
From then on, women began making headway into government and politics.
As soon as the ink dried on the amendment, Minnie Fisher Cunningham (1882-1964) helped organize the National League of Women. By 1928, she ran for the U.S. Senate in her own right, although she was handicapped by inadequate funding and few male endorsements. Nevertheless, she showed women they had a place in politics.
Female senators have trickled in and out of Capitol Hill in ones, twos and threes.
That is, until 1993, when a record five women were elected to office. Since then their numbers have steadily grown.
Jump forward nearly a century later, and the Temple’s museum’s exhibit reflects evolving times and attitudes, especially in the rarified confines of the Senate.
The exhibit was developed from work by Seattle-based photojournalist Melina Mara who began photographing the 13 women serving in the U.S. Senate in 2001. Mara kept snapping the lens as women senators grew in number to 14 in 2003.
Mara’s photographs were featured in a traveling exhibition produced by the Briscoe Center for American History on the University of Texas at Austin campus. The exhibit opened at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 2003 followed by a national tour. The Temple museum’s exhibit is presented by the Briscoe Center in partnership with Humanities Texas.
In 2005, Mara’s photographs were published in the book…
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