Today in history: When Texas women got the vote.
On March 26, 1918, Gov. William P. Hobby signed a bill granting women the right to vote in primary elections after it passed the Texas House and Senate. However, the new provisions were far from perfect. Black women were still disenfranchised and faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and other Jim Crow era obstacles. Women also needed to register to vote first. Impressively, the first election in which women could vote was the July 1918 primary, with a deadline set a mere 17 days after the bill took effect. By then, however, Texas suffragists were a well-oiled machine—they registered more than 386,000 women to vote before the deadline.
That would prove key: Hobby faced James Ferguson in the gubernatorial election that year, pitting the incumbent (Hobby) against a former governor. The Texas Equal Suffrage Association approached Hobby with a deal: give women the vote, and they’d back him over Ferguson. At the time, Texas was pretty much a one-party state, which meant the Democratic primary would all but decide the matter.
In June 1919, Texas became the ninth state in the Union and the first state in the South to ratify the 19th Amendment, which became law on August 26, 1920. TESA was at the forefront of the effort to pass the 19th Amendment. Once that happened, its members dissolved the organization and formed the League of Women Voters of Texas.
After winning the right to vote, women began to run for office, with mixed success. One of those members was Edith Wilmans, who grew up in Dallas and attended Dallas public schools before getting married and then helping organize the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association. She would later become the president of the Democratic Women’s Association of Texas. She also decided to study law to better understand the legal issues facing women and children, and was admitted to the bar in 1918. She represented Dallas County in the Texas Legislature for one term in 1923, endorsing legislation on child support and child care, and advocating for the establishment of the Dallas County District Court of Domestic Relations. She ran unsuccessfully for governor and was briefly appointed to the All-Woman Supreme Court before being bounced for lacking the required seven years of experience practicing law by a few months.
You can read more about some of the women who shaped Dallas below. The deadline to register to vote in the May elections is April 2.