| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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TEXAS HAD THE FIRST ELECTED WOMAN GOVERNOR
It would be a shame to let this Woman's History month pass without just a little reminder of a Texas claim to fame. Texas was the first state in the union to have a woman elected for governor. Miriam Amanda Ferguson, may have entered into politics through the back door, so to speak, but she is entitled to a little bigger part in history than she usually gets, although some said her husband was the power behind the throne.
Women had just won the right to vote in 1920, and Miriam Amanda Ferguson exercised her right by voting for her husband, "Farmer Jim" Ferguson who was impeached for misappropriation of funds--though the case was never proven--which barred him from ever running for public office.
Fancher Archer, retired lawyer who keeps up with the political picture and remembers, though he was very young at the time, the Ferguson days, tole me about the road built under Jim's administration. It was more like a train track than a modern highway that stretched from Temple to Belton. After all, those few, new-fangled automobiles that traveled a ways then had a flat, didn't go fast and only used tracks for the wheels. So the road was two strips fourteen inches wide, bricked tracks with a hump in between, a real deterrent to passing. Actually, four tracks were built as they did allow that some people going to Belton might want to return.
History says it was Jim that made the decision to run M. A. Ferguson, soon reduced to Ma, for the state's highest office. Soon stickers "Me for Ma" began to appear--and some said, "Me for Ma, and I ain't got a dern thing against Pa!" They opposed the Ku Klux Klan, chief supporters of the other candidate. Ma's supporters fought the "hooded monster" with poems such as:
Hoods off!
Along the street there comes
Patriotic daughters and loyal sons,
A crowd of bonnets beneath the sky,
Hoods off!
Miriam Ferguson is passing by.
One song, to the tune of "Put on Your old Grey Bonnet" rang in the streets. Ma wore her bonnet to remind voters of her farm heritage. When the Klan railed at her saying she was fit only for the business of being a wife and mother and for feeding chickens in her backyard, she had her picture made in her bonnet feeding her prize Leghorns and one canning peaches that a woman from Tyler sent to her.
Get out your old-time bonnet
And put Miriam Ferguson on it,
And hitch your wagon to a star.
So on election day
We each of us can say
Hurrah! Governor Miriam, Hurrah!
A Ferguson club sent her a broom to be used to sweep and clean house at Austin. A poem attached to the broom read:
As sure as comes election day,
A broom to you we send.
In sunshine use the brush part,
In storm the other end.
The battle won, it was Jim who extended his hand to greet politicians when they entered the governor's office and sat at most of the state's boards and commissions--but that is not to say that Ma didn't do the work. Making believers that women had the ability to hold such office and guide a state was not easy, but others were looking. The New York World said, "Today a woman is to be Governor of a great State, and most people are more interested in the principles she fought for than in the fact that she is a woman..."
In spite of the pride she took in being a country woman, Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson could trace her lineage to Edward I of England and the Scottish patriot, Sir William Wallace. Better educated than most women of her time, Miriam attended Salado College and then Baylor Female College in Belton. After taking office, Ma invited the press to stop by the mansion for hot biscuits and some of her homemade peach preserves.
Although she never lived down the slogan, "Two Governors for the Price of One," her columns in the newspaper, the Ferguson Forum, revealed some very progressive thinking about women's right to enter the business world, to dress as they pleased, to cut their hair, to learn a profession--and not to neglect their homes.
Ma Ferguson served a second term in 1932, but those were Depression days. About the biggest event that term was a visit from Will Rogers who did a roping exhibition for the people of the capitol. The state was in a grave economic situation when Mrs. Feguson order the banks to close their doors and called for strict ceilings on state spending. She obtained money through such federal programs as CCC and WPA to mitigate the plight of the unemployed Texans.
Who knows how to evaluate the governorship of Ma Ferguson? In 1954 she was honored for contributions to education, but Texas history books accord her little space in the history of the feminist movement. One newspaper ascribed her lack of fame to "Too Much Husband."
Our claims to fame in Texas cover many topics and people from calf ropers, football players, presidents, and many others. Maybe Ma Ferguson, the first woman governor in the United States, deserves a little bigger piece of the pie.
Hurrah! Governor Miriam, Hurrah!