The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas

Mundine's proposal came at the constitutional convention of 1868-69, which rejected it fifty-two to thirteen. In early 1869 Martha Goodwin Tunstall addressed suffrage supporters in Austin, and the new National Woman Suffrage Association listed her as its vice president for Texas. Sarah Grimke Wattles Hiatt petitioned the 1875 convention. In the 1880s the cause traveled with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union through Jenny Bland Beauchamp and Mariana Thompson Folsom, and Eliza E. Peterson of Texarkana later led its Colored Division. At a 1907 hearing on Jess A. Baker's resolution, the sculptor Elisabet Ney spoke for suffrage.

What the plaque says

The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas Legal efforts to enfranchise women in Texas can be traced to 1868, when Rep. T. H. Mundine of Burleson introduced a woman suffrage bill in the state legislature. In the following five decades Texas women formed suffrage organizations to lobby for the right to vote. The suffragists included Rebecca Henry Hayes, who organized the Texas Equal Rights Association (TERA) in 1893; and sisters Annette, Elizabeth, and Katherine Finnigan, who founded the Texas Woman Suffrage Association (TWSA) in 1903. The TWSA, renamed the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA) in 1916, led the final push for voting rights. The movement's leaders during this period included Jane Y. McCallum, Minnie Fisher Cunningham, Eleanor Brackenridge, and Annie Webb Blanton. In March 1918 Rep. C. B. Metcalfe of San Antonio sponsored successful legislation giving women the right to vote in primary elections. It was signed into law by Gov. William P. Hobby just 17 days before the voter registration deadline for that year's election. In that short period of time, more than 386,000 Texas women registered to vote, including many who gathered at the Travis County Courthouse at this site. On June 28, 1919, Texas became the 9th state to ratify the Woman Suffrage (19th) Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — steps away
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.6 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.8 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.

More markers nearby

• African Americans in the Texas Revolution — steps away
• Governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton — steps away
• First Classes of the University of Texas Law School — steps away
• Governor Edmund Jackson Davis — steps away