First Juries to Sit Women in Dallas County

The marker began as a student's research paper. Andrea Norris Kline, an SMU history major, used census records, newspaper archives and Texas Legislature records to document jury service in Dallas County for her professor, Crista DeLuzio. With the Dallas County Historical Commission they drafted the proposal for this marker, which was unveiled on the east side of the Old Red Courthouse on October 30. SMU's account says that by the 1930s the Dallas Business and Professional Women's Club, the Dallas League of Women Voters and the Dallas Morning News had all made jury service a priority.

What the plaque says

First Juries to Sit Women in Dallas County Although the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote in 1920, women were not permitted to serve on juries in Texas until 1954. Efforts to add women to jury lists began soon after passage of the 19th amendment , when it became clear that the right of jury service would not be granted to women along with the right of suffrage. These efforts hastened during the 1930s and 1940s. During this time, local newspapers drew attention to the issue by reporting on women who were called to jury duty by mistake, and the Dallas Morning News pointed out the absurdity of a system that would allow female district judges but denied those same women the right to sit on a jury. The amendment to the Texas Constitution requiring that women serve on grand and petit juries was finally approved by voters on November 2, 1954. Although women were not officially added to the Dallas County jury selection lists until August of 1955, women who continued to be called to duty "by mistake" had the right to serve for the first time. In November 1954, Adelyne Dransfield, the sole female member of the jury on which she was serving, was elected as one of the first female jury "foremen" in Dallas County. The first occcasions for women to serve on juries in Dallas County were key steps in the ongoing struggle for gender equality and the achievement of full citizineship rights for women in Dallas and throughout the nation. The first women to serve on juries in Dallas County asserted their right to complete this very important job of citizenship with legitimacy and confidence. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — steps away
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 0.7 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 1.2 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 2.5 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Women's Suffrage in Dallas County — steps away
• 1910 Lynching of Allen Brooks — steps away
• Log Cabin Pioneers of Dallas County — steps away
• Dallas County — steps away