The Dallas equal suffrage association, political style, and popular culture: grassroots strategies of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1913-1919.

LONG FAMILIAR AS A MEANS FOR EXPRESSING SOCIAL VALUES AND FOR resisting them, popular culture has served political purposes as well. From the symbolic log cabins of the 1840 presidential race to present-day televised advertisements, parties and candidates have employed cultural metaphors in United States politics. The drive to win the vote for women may be the best example of how political campaigns have been affected by mores and social conventions, and how those campaigns in turn have used the prevailing values and tastes to persuade the voters.

The suffragists benefited from the experience of other organizations, particularly during the later years of their movement, 1913-1919. They drew upon the educational and advertising techniques of the contemporary national parties, the interest group tactics of the women's club movement, and the popular politics of both the English suffragettes and antebellum parties in the United States. (1) But because they faced gender assumptions and social restrictions that rarely troubled other political movements, American suffragists needed more than examples of successful campaigning. The resources for meeting their challenges were, as it turned out, readily available. Scholarship in popular culture can help to clarify how the suffragists used cherished symbolism and honored ideals to adapt community festivals and social occasions to proven political strategies. The result was a sophisticated style unique in American political history for the degree to which it integrated a controversial issue into public life, both in specific communities and nationwide. (2)

The suffragist accomplishment is most clearly visible at the local level. Indeed, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) derived much of its vitality from a network of grassroots societies. Despite the NAWSA's policy of centralizing the campaign, regional diversity required state and community suffrage organizations to develop a good measure of originality. Strategies that worked in California, for example, could fail in New York. Suffragists in a number of states--among them Iowa, Wisconsin, and Washington--only cautiously adopted tactics recommended from the NAWSA headquarters in New York City, while in Texas, local associations often rejected them altogether. (3) In a nation spread over a vast geographical area and composed of a population with varied cultural origins and economic interests, suffragists needed to tailor their campaigns to their specific communities. Everywhere, local sensibilities required some degree of adaptation and, at times, concessions to traditional expectations.

In Dallas, Texas, the suffragists developed a campaign based on their understanding of the current social values and community standards. The public image of the city's Equal Suffrage Association (DESA) was initially so decorous as to appear apolitical. The Dallas Morning News described those involved with the first formal DESA meeting, held in a private home on March 15, 1913, as "chiefly college young women and young matrons," who had been "more prominent in social affairs, heretofore, than ... in women's club work or other civic matters." The reporter also recognized veteran club leaders "aiding by their experience in the work of the organization" but failed to mention the identities of a number of the younger suffragists. In addition to the mature clubwomen who had led efforts for local and state reforms during the past twenty years, the forty-one charter members included the niece of an officer of the first Texas suffrage association of 1893-96 and the daughters of several women still active in the city's club movement. With family traditions of female civic activism, younger women who wanted the vote as a matter of justice joined a number of experienced club leaders who were disgruntled with their own lack of any way to hold lawmakers and public officials accountable. (4) The challenges before the new organization's members were typical of those faced by suffragists everywhere. Their most immediate problem was also the most obvious: the depth of contemporary convictions about gender, specifically traditional beliefs regarding women. Gender in turn informed two additional issues, white supremacy (under the euphemism of "states' rights") and Prohibition. Both were highly emotional subjects and always prominent concerns in southern politics. The nature of the suffrage effort in Dallas would depend on still another factor, the community itself, with its employment patterns, social origins, and class, ethnic, and racial profiles.

The identities of the DESA's three local constituencies, that is, would influence if not determine the campaign's tactics and shape its strategy. Of the three, the majority of women were in many ways the most crucial: only a wide base within the female population could provide the credibility that suffrage was a genuine woman's issue and not merely the whim of a few society ladies. The other two constituencies were male. One consisted of the influential business owners and leading professional men who belonged among the city's privileged residents. The second included the majority of voters--white middle-class salaried employees and blue-collar wage earners, African Americans who could pay the poll tax to vote in general elections, and immigrants from Europe and Mexico.

Beginning its campaign with the strategies used successfully by the women's club movement, the DESA at first concentrated on informing the public. Suffrage leaders wrote articles for local periodicals, distributed pamphlets and brochures at meetings of other organizations, and drew arguments from those used by the clubwomen to justify their expansion of female roles beyond the private sphere. Women would use the ballot to "clean up" politics, the suffragists insisted, to raise the standards of public life, and to apply the values of home and family to community problems. Mothers could help to shape the world for their children; employed women could vote for candidates who supported laws for improved working conditions and higher wages; and most immediately, activist clubwomen would have new power for sensitizing lawmakers to the effects of policy on public health and private life in the home. (5)

During the campaign's later years of 1916-19, the DESA developed the "white-gloved" strategies of female voluntarism into an articulated political style, designed to counter the powerful social influences arrayed against it. To a far greater degree than any other issue at the time, woman suffrage seemed to challenge basic social arrangements and to threaten people's deepest assumptions about their daily lives and relationships. Enfranchising women was an abrupt departure from long-accepted ideas about femininity and masculinity and, to many, about the very nature of female and male. (6) Given the cause they had to "sell," the suffragists needed ways to penetrate the dense, entrenched resistance of custom and tradition. Moreover, because they shared the basic values of their times, the process of developing their campaign would, in a sense, owe as much to a process of evolution as to conscious design.

The most direct means lay in popular culture. For acceptable forms and appropriate venues in which to present their cause, suffrage organizations throughout the United States turned to familiar imagery and comforting symbolism, traditional festivals, well-known customs, and seasonal celebrations--that is, the "texts" of popular culture. Unlike regular political campaigns with their periodic activities at prescribed intervals, the drive for woman suffrage was perennial. For political work that continued year-round every year, the texts of popular culture proved particularly conducive to integrating the demand for the vote into community life and establishing the issue within the local political dialogue. At the same time, community and social occasions served as natural camouflage for the suffrage cause, blunting its radical implications with the familiarity of customary events.

Of traditional American festivals, state and county fairs offered perhaps the easiest way to publicize the cause. (7) The State Fair of Texas, chartered in 1886 and held annually in Dallas, attracted visitors from hundreds of miles away. By 1913 daily attendance approached 30,000, though visitors numbered a record-breaking 120,230 one Saturday that season. Everyone went to the fair--wage earners, business owners, homemakers, clubwomen, farmers, and schoolchildren. On each "Suffrage Day" from 1913 through 1917, the fair's official flag was a yellow and white banner proclaiming "Votes for Women." Decorating a booth to display posters and charts tracing the issue's progress through the states, the DESA hosted the Texas Equal Suffrage Association's (TESA) programs and activities as the state's suffragists integrated a political issue into this major annual event. (8)

Suffrage Day at the State Fair of 1915 was perhaps the DESA's single most colorful event, with "the biggest gathering of advocates of the ... movement ever held [here];" according to the Morning News. In a morning-long publicity stunt, local suffragists met the TESA's three hundred delegates at the train station and drove them to their hotels in automobiles flying bright yellow "Votes for Women" pennants. After the annual luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel, a number of decorated carriages joined the cars in a parade to the fairgrounds. As they spread through the park to address the crowds from the open cars, the suffragists presented what the Dallas Times Herald called "the most unique public speaking [event] ever staged in Dallas." With the day also dedicated to traveling salesmen, the women drafted men into their campaign. Risking accusations of impropriety and unladylike boldness, the suffragists persuaded "every traveling salesman at the Fair" to wear a bright yellow "Votes for Women" badge as he toured the exhibitions and attended the sports and cultural events. As a result, the Times Herald reported, "the highways and the byways are golden with the admonition of the cause." (9)

Suffrage Day at the fair was one of the most obvious ways that the Dallas suffragists integrated their political message into popular culture. With its mix of national and regional forms of entertainment and recreation, the fair expressed society's dominant values as the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy joined in an autumn festival celebrating the productivity of a commercially oriented society. The variety of its offerings also enabled the fair to transcend class differences. Competitions in farm produce and domestic crafts; displays and demonstrations of manufactured products, appliances, and machinery; baseball games and horse races; the annual art exhibition and concerts featuring popular and classical music on the same program--many of these events held interest for general audiences or, at the least, were convenient to casual passersby. (10) The fair's wide public appeal made it especially attractive for the suffragists' purposes.

Fairs, May Day festivals, and other community events appeared to be mere entertainment, but in reality they expressed deep-seated values and basic social principles. For every society, recreation and play have performed complex functions. (11) Traditional celebrations serve to confirm fundamental values and social expectations and, at the same time, present opportunities to challenge accepted practices. As the suffragists' booths and programs at the State Fair of Texas demonstrated, such festivities may also become occasions to assert alternative, perhaps even subversive ideas. When any group in a community uses public events to question tradition and custom, entertainment and recreation acquire political implications, however subtle. Even the polite expression of conflict illustrates how easily popular culture may become the venue for a struggle for hegemony, as a powerless or heretofore ignored group seeks to share the authority to define community standards. (12)

The texts of popular culture serve political purposes in a more overt manner as well. Deriving authenticity from the system of social values, political culture easily finds expression through traditional imagery and just as readily lends itself to competition. (13) In ways known well to every generation, the decisions, tactics, and personal behavior of candidates and officeholders have incited humor for public amusement and have provided dramatic themes for serious literature. Electoral campaigns routinely rely upon familiar metaphors and symbolism, seeking always to evoke deeply held values and to appeal to the voters' sympathy and to their sense of right and order. However frivolous they may appear, campaign spectacles and paraphernalia also use treasured concepts and imagery to associate political positions with honored communal memories and ideals.

For the five seasons of 1913-17, the TESA was the only political organization at the State Fair in Dallas. Every other group recognized with a special fair day had social, cultural, educational, or, like the traveling salesmen, professional purposes. For women, spreading a political message carried a degree of social risk; accompanying that risk was the threat of having their cause dismissed as "unladylike" and generally disreputable. Joining the fun at a well-attended traditional occasion, however, enabled the suffragists to affirm their loyalty to accepted values while they criticized injustice. Participation in the fair softened the subversive edge of their political demands, too, by acknowledging their membership in the community. For a generation that disapproved of women in politics, popular culture offered a strategic approach to the political realm as well as lighthearted ways to articulate a serious agenda.

As they made their way into the political culture, suffragists everywhere could look to the pioneers in the voluntarist experience. Before 1910, clubwomen throughout the United States gained, in the name of social betterment, what may well have been more direct access to power than females as a population had ever before achieved. By 1913, when the suffrage movement was revived in Texas, the state's upper-and middle-class urban women had an impressive list of accomplishments to their credit. They had founded civic institutions that were immediately perceived as community assets and later supported with public money; they had altered the physical environment to improve the health and safety of urban residents; they had allied with progressive judges and legislators to establish the juvenile justice arm of the state's judicial system; and they had initiated various publicly funded services for children, mothers, and the poor, then persuaded city and county officials to open agencies that institutionalized those services. (14)

In the process of winning such reforms, clubwomen in Dallas and other Texas cities learned to work within the political system to change public policies. Their success affected more than immediate social problems. The expansion of "domestic" concerns into public life not only altered the political dialogue but also stretched the public's conception of the responsibilities appropriate to government. Whatever their discomfort with partisanship and the existing political parties, the clubwomen's reform efforts enlarged women's community roles and anticipated their direct political participation. (15)

Although they lacked political rights, clubwomen had done much to turn Dallas into something of a Progressive stronghold. To a large extent, the women's achievements were possible because a significant number of the city's male leaders agreed with their goals, or at least considered them harmless. By 1906 the city's most prominent and influential business owners, bankers, and professional men leaned toward the Progressive end of the political spectrum. The clubwomen relied upon their support for such reforms as the pure food and drugs ordinance, the hiring of a police matron and a truant officer, and city funding for free lunches and nurses in the public schools. (16)

The men found other measures less palatable. For example, they needed considerable persuasion to use tax money for public parks and playgrounds. Similarly, the clubwomen worked for five years to convince the city government to launch a major bond issue for a water purification plant. Such innovations as the board of public health, the department of public welfare, the public employment office, and the free legal aid bureau were, some of the men believed, entirely too advanced. In 1917 a number of business leaders worked to defeat the mayor they had helped to elect only two years earlier because his administration had inaugurated these "useless city agencies." Progressivism in Dallas coexisted somewhat uneasily with more traditional political convictions. (17)

Despite its commercial and financial as well as social ties with the Midwest, the city's values and orientation belonged with the South. Founded in 1841 by a frontier land speculator, Dallas was a country market town by 1850 and ever afterward retained its commercial character. At the time of first settlement, the majority of the city's residents undoubtedly came from rural communities and small towns in the Southeast, where virtually every white person accepted the stereotypes that bolstered a social hierarchy based on race. (18) The regional biases of states' rights and white supremacy allied with--indeed derived from--older, still deeper prejudices. The contemporary conceptions of gender, including the way white southerners understood familial authority and the nature of male-female relationships, also affected people's attitudes regarding votes for women. (19)

Along with the usual social constrictions, Dallas suffragists, like the clubwomen before them, had to deal with the state's political alignments. Texas was dominated by a Democratic Party split into progressive and conservative wings. In the years before the suffrage movement was rekindled, conservative Democratic lawmakers joined their progressive colleagues to enact social measures introduced by the clubwomen and to expand the property rights of married women. Despite such occasional modest reforms, progressive Democrats hesitated at times before the widespread suspicion of governmental authority that persisted in Texas public opinion. Like conservatives, they often seemed reluctant to heed strong demands for social change, particularly for woman suffrage. (20)

The best hope of converting lawmakers was grassroots campaigning to win over their constituents. By mid-June 1918 twelve local societies--more than anywhere else in Texas and most of them organized by Dallas suffragists--made Dallas County a hotbed of suffrage activity. (21) These groups, moreover, reflected national developments. With the adoption of Carrie Chapman Catt's "Winning Plan" in the fall of 1916, the NAWSA asserted its authority over state associations while emphasizing the importance of local organization. Soon afterward, the Texas association's third president, Minnie Fisher Cunningham of Galveston, instructed local leaders to organize their work by precinct, "the smallest unit of political organization--the one that comes directly in touch with the voter [and] hence the most important." She recommended personal contact with each of the 400,000 registered voters in Texas through "a host of individual workers." (22)

Cunningham's ambitious plans differed considerably from women's customary tactics. For nearly twenty years, Texas clubwomen's strategy of working as a pressure group had enabled them to avoid partisanship with regard to the issues as well as association with the organized parties. They took pride in having evaded accusations of "unladylike" or "unwomanly" behavior and, above all, having protected themselves from the dreaded label "political." (23) The suffragists were unable to deny the political nature of their cause or to avoid pleading it publicly, and they had to reach a diverse mass audience.

Of primary importance were the thousands of women who lived conventional, even traditional, lives, and it was they upon whom the suffragists most depended for a base of support and good will. The vast majority had never entered the labor market. If they had experience with the public realm, it had come through club memberships or church organizations. Most were full-time homemakers; others were widowed heads of households; a small number were adult daughters attending college or living with their parents. Dependent upon husbands or fathers for their standard of living and social status, roughly half were comfortable enough to be classified as middle class and privileged. (24) As a general rule--and perhaps contrary to present-day assumptions--this group offered better opportunities for suffrage recruitment than the women who worked outside the home.

The female occupational profile helps to explain this apparent paradox. Among the employed women in Dallas, 55 percent were in some form of domestic service in 1910, while another 22 percent held what could be considered "white-collar" jobs. By 1920 the proportions changed to 35 percent in domestic service and 45 percent in white-collar positions. This decade-long alteration in women's occupations, however, brought few recruits to the suffragist ranks. The DESA ignored the domestic workers, 73 percent of whom were African Americans, while female white-collar employees tended to be less active than homemakers in clubs and organizations. (25) At the same time, women in textile and clothing manufacturing, though well represented in suffrage associations elsewhere, were declining in Dallas from approximately 10 percent to 6.4 percent of the female labor force. More serious than their falling numbers was the fact that, except for a small garment workers union formed in 1913, the city's female factory and mill workers were not organized. Blue-collar women in Dallas lacked the political experience that unions provided in the Northeast and that clubs everywhere offered for upper- and middle-class homemakers. (26)

No matter how many women wanted the ballot, however, only men could vote to enfranchise them. The DESA's two male constituencies included first, the business owners, professionals, and bankers who wielded considerable influence over public opinion and who tended to support the clubwomen's projects. Second was the majority of voters, including the owners of small businesses, blue-collar wage earners, white-collar salaried employees, and the less prominent professionals. Among Dallas men employed in the census categories of trade and transportation, more than two-thirds held what could be regarded as white-collar positions in 1910 and 1920. These occupations plus clerical jobs, professional service, and certain kinds of work in manufacturing and public service extended the designation of "white-collar" to almost half of the city's male labor force by 1920. This socioeconomic profile of the city's voters, most of whom had attained (or at least had aspirations toward) middle- to upper-class status, would prove significant for the suffrage cause. (27)

For both the voters and the nonsuffragist women, the DESA took care to project an appropriate public image. In March 1916 the city's annual Style Show offered an opportunity to attract the "right" sort of attention. Sponsored by the city's leading department stores to promote the sale of women's clothing, the event included a parade of decorated cars, with a competition for the best entry. The contest rules forbade banners and signs, so the suffragists used yellow and white flowers, "the colors of the suffrage cause the world over," to spell "Votes for Women" and "Victory in 1917" along the car's sides. The DESA's "suffrage automobile" did not win, but a prize was not their actual purpose. (28) More important was the publicity about the suffragists' presence at Style Show activities, which refuted accusations that only "mannish" or "unnatural" women wanted to vote. Besides fostering their image as "normal" women who enjoyed pretty clothes and cared about personal appearance, competing in the parade amounted to participation in the city's mercantile-consumer culture.

Beyond its commercial purposes, the Style Show parade was, like the State Fair, an occasion of mass entertainment. So, too, was the DESA's production in January 1917 of a musical comedy entitled "The Polynesian Princess." Belonging in the category of popular rather than high culture, the play presented a contrast to the clubwomen's benefit recitals of classical music and fund-raising pageants that depicted events from Greco-Roman and medieval literature and history. The suffragists sponsored a single performance of the "Princess" and sold tickets to the general public. Featuring a cast of local amateur singers, actors, and dancers, the "Princess" included a chorus of "bathing girls" in swimsuits, "a Greek and Egyptian ballet," and several "real society girls" modeling the latest fashions. The play attracted a capacity audience and earned a review by the Times Herald as "a bully good show." Proceeds from the "Princess" and the ball afterward raised most of the $800 the DESA owed on its pledge to the state association. (29)

While musical comedy appealed perhaps to the "middle-brow" level of popular culture, the Colonial Ball of February 1919 was intentionally elitist. Held on George Washington's birthday and expected to be "one of the most brilliant [recent] social affairs," the evening opened with Governor and Mrs. William P. Hobby leading the grand march, after which a group of young "society girls" (probably the season's debutantes) performed a minuet. Good attendance by the city's social leaders raised money to campaign for the referendum to add a woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution. (30) Fund-raising aside, in a city where the more privileged residents defined social values and established the standards of taste, even an exclusive event helped the DESA to showcase its members' participation in community activities and to build their image as women who shared the accepted feminine values.

The Dallas suffragists cultivated their image in other conventional ways as well. When they served as hostesses at the reception for the ranchers' wives during the Cattleman's Convention, they performed the kind of social duty expected of privileged women. Adapting yet another customary social form to a political purpose, the DESA held a series of afternoon teas. In addition to recruiting new members, the teas fostered the organization's reputation as a group of southern ladies. (31)

However oriented toward local and regional concerns, the Dallas suffragists honored cultural symbolism that resonated throughout American society. Their careful nurturance of an "appropriate" image was dictated by gender. Defining primary relationships, characterizing social responsibilities in terms of "masculine" and "feminine," and determining social order, gender designated anything political as male. As very possibly the most basic of social factors, gender placed the suffragist campaign at what Lawrence Grossberg has called "the intersections of popular culture, popular politics ..., and systematic structures and forces of political and economic inequality and domination." (32)

The women's campaign for the vote, that is, carded far-reaching implications for political organization, political authority, and cultural hegemony. Potentially, woman suffrage threatened to alter the composition of the political parties and the nature of campaigning; change the party memberships, as well as state, local, and national party leaderships; and add new, probably disturbing ideas, issues, and demands to the political dialogue and to the decision-making processes of government. Gender gave the suffrage campaign significance much beyond the doubling of the electorate: conceivably, women with votes could defy male hegemony and upend the nation's political priorities, to say nothing of national political functioning. (33)

The suffragists may not have understood their campaign as a challenge to what we now define as gender, but the movement's leaders saw the need to accommodate the emotional power of long-accepted ideals. As an opponent once observed, the suffragists' greatest challenge lay in the need "to overcome not an argument but a feeling." (34) By admitting females to an activity so associated with men as to be part of the very definition of maleness, woman suffrage seemed to threaten both the bounds of political rights and gender conventions. (35) To counter such basic fears about woman suffrage's effect on social order and personal identity, the suffragists needed familiar symbolism, nonthreatening rhetoric, and arguments more subtle than rational debate.

In every society, communication occurs not only through words but also through behavior, demeanor, gesture, dress, and even material objects. While their speeches and campaign literature advocated what many saw as radical change, the suffragists' nonverbal discourse remained determinedly decorous. Particularly in the South, as the Dallas suffragists well knew, an appropriate image could be at least as persuasive as anything spoken. Deeply embedded in contemporary social assumptions and observed through the conventions of propriety, the ideal of the lady dictated a code of behavior. The fundamental requirement was to conduct oneself always, in the words of one DESA officer, "in a dignified and womanly manner." (36)

With careful observance of customary social forms and acceptable behavior, the Dallas suffragists honored the image of the lady and thereby set the parameters for their political style. The essence of "the lady" resided in the conventions of behavior, dress, manners, and etiquette, all reflecting the community standards of respectability. The observance of such expectations acknowledged the primacy of contemporary gender assumptions and signaled respect for the age-old female roles in the family and home. Thus, in keeping with Michael McGerr's observations, a political style defined by propriety achieved more than mere packaging for the campaign or adornment for the sake of appearances. (37) Rather, style was integral to the DESA's message: the Dallas women requesting admittance to the male rituals of politics and voting were not radical or "unnatural"; they were responsible and dependable members of the community who could be trusted to uphold central values.

Deference to tradition seemed to dictate the DESA's activities. Among the most prominent and active Dallas suffragists were some so circumspect that, for example, they refused to have their pictures ever published in a newspaper. (38) The influence of such leaders cramped the style of other suffragists who were inclined to be more outspoken and demonstrative. In June 1916 DESA officers seemed ready to vary their activities by participating in a torchlight rally sponsored by the local Democrats. After learning that party officials expected more than 5,000 men, many of them coming by train from other north Texas cities and towns, DESA officers bowed to the accepted notions regarding females and public space and withdrew from the event. In other southern cities, such as Nashville, suffragists assumed more liberal political cultures. The campaigns in Houston and Galveston also included open-air demonstrations and rallies. (39) The only outdoor events in Dallas were the Suffrage Day activities during the State Fair, and even these were programs presented by the Texas association and merely hosted by the DESA.

Such concessions to traditional propriety related the suffrage campaign to the political style of the clubwomen, despite the differences in goals and strategies. The clubwomen's purposes were social in nature, and on the occasions when they had to work through political means, their tactics remained private and largely dependent on personal contact with officeholders and lawmakers. With behind-the-scenes lobbying of elected officials, meticulous studies, and lectures by visiting experts, club leaders limited themselves to reasoned argument and the spreading of information. Only with the annual "Better Babies" contest at the State Fair did the Dallas women's clubs take a reform campaign to a public event. (40) Without ever claiming power outright, the club leaders employed a discreet style of "politicking" that consisted of private communication and limited contacts with state officeholders and male urban leaders.

By contrast, however elite and privileged the suffragist membership, DESA leaders had to build a systematic campaign that could persuade a mass constituency. Focused on a single political issue rather than a series of social reforms, the suffragists challenged the power of the men of their own class and demanded recognition for women's authority in public life. To reassure voters who felt uneasy about such changes in female behavior, the suffragists turned to forms of expression and to symbolism so basic and familiar that cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall has described them as seeming hardly to belong with popular culture at all. (41)

The most comforting of these would, as the clubwomen had discovered, prove to be the most potent. For all socioeconomic groups, few symbols commanded the reverence and sentimentality accorded to motherhood. Belonging, some would say, within the psychological realm of archetypes, motherhood assumed a kind of sacredness long before the Texas suffragist movement was reorganized in 1913. The figure of the mother had long held the status of social icon, with meaning that informed the relationships and values upon which people depended in their day-to-day lives. Popular culture was rife with sentimental imagery representing the ties between mothers and children.

Local and regional expression of maternal values mirrored the nationwide impulse to honor, indeed to adulate motherhood. Texas was among the trendsetters, with the governor designating the state's first Mother's Day in 1909. Sponsored in Dallas by the Council of Mothers, the celebration soon grew too large for any local auditorium, and by 1913 each of the city's churches held its own Mother's Day observance. The new holiday expressed the sentiment behind the older national movement known as "scientific motherhood"--the idea that mothers should educate themselves on the latest techniques to promote their children's health, care, and nurture--which in turn meshed with the Progressive politics of "child saving." (42)

Perhaps the most powerful image supporting women's accession to political power, the icon of the mother drew the issue of woman suffrage to the heart of cultural values. Sentimentality aside, motherhood occupied an obvious and unquestioned social centrality. As the source of physical and the most basic social reproduction, the function and role of the mother had few, if any rivals in importance to society. In obvious ways suffragist appeals to motherhood spoke to what John Storey has called "the production and reproduction of the social relations of everyday life." (43) Whatever the reluctance of many politicians and voters to reform the conditions in Which thousands of real mothers struggled to rear their children, virtually everyone honored the abstract ideal of motherhood and acknowledged its personal and emotional significance.

For the suffragists, maternal symbolism became, again in Storey's words, "a site" for "the articulation of meaning" and, as such, "a potential site of conflict." That is, even the revered image of the mother served as "terrain" for "a continual struggle over meaning." (44) At the heart of this contest over meaning was maternal authority and particularly its extension beyond the home. In the clubwomen's campaigns to alter public policies, authority in public life implied power--the ability to enlist government to maintain the well-being of home and family, to raise the standards of public health, to improve the public schools, and to insure the public safety. Operating at an emotional level inaccessible to arguments about justice and right, the icon of the mother had well served the clubwomen's programs. For the suffragists, motherhood reinforced the demand for full citizenship and, more important, extended the social authority achieved by privileged clubwomen to women as a population. (45)

While motherhood provided the strongest connection between gender and politics, its powerful imagery of relationships served also to mute the individualism implied by the quest for the vote. The suffragists adopted maternalist rhetoric with ease, for motherhood touched the most personal area of their lives: the majority of the DESA officers and members were homemakers and mothers who could honestly appeal to familial values as reasons for their desire for the vote. In 1917, when the Times Herald published a weekly series explaining "Why I Am A Suffragist," several contributors related their support for the suffrage movement to their maternal concerns. In an article asserting that the "Political Dominance of Men [is] an Evil to the Mothers," one DESA member wrote, "When I became a mother, I became a suffragist." Another believed the world to be in need of "the instinct of motherhood," while still others stated convictions that "Women Should Have [a] Hand in Legislation Affecting the Home," "Women in [the] Home Should Have [a] Voice in Government," and "There Is Need of the Mother Heart in Legislation." (46)

The idealization of motherhood crossed gender as well as class lines; men, too, expressed faith in maternal abilities to nurture social virtue. In 1916 the Texas Congress of Mothers listed eleven prominent Dallas men as life members. In April 1919 the Woodmen of the World's annual convention met in Dallas. The organization's president endorsed woman suffrage in his opening address, assuring his listeners that "the South and the Nation need fear no danger when the queen of the home is on guard at the ballot box." Individual men did more than revere motherhood. Belief was widespread among men that women in general, but mothers in particular, would use the ballot to solve social problems and, as one Texas state senator predicted, "set the country upon the right course." (47)

Related in public perception to maternal imagery was another emotional issue, Prohibition. (48) Evangelical Protestants, who frequently linked the sanctity of the home with the purity of motherhood, and Texas progressive Democrats both tended to be committed drys who advocated woman suffrage. More controversial in Texas than even the states' rights/white supremacy issue, Prohibition pervaded the state's politics for decades before the renewal of suffrage agitation. Despite its prominence in the political dialogue, Prohibition's influence on behalf of woman suffrage had begun to soften. In 1916 the state attorney general won a significant victory over the Texas Brewers' Association, a well-heeled organization of saloon owners and brewing companies with a history of illegal activities in state politics as well as strong opposition to woman suffrage. After this, Texas wets steadily lost ground. In Dallas a municipal election in April 1916 banned alcoholic beverages from the State Fair, and the city "went dry" in the local option election of September 1917. In both cases, the drys won without women's votes. As the states proceeded to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution during 1918, suffragists grew concerned about retaining prohibitionist support for their cause. (49)

Early in 1917, another constellation of symbols took precedence as a national crisis drew suffragists yet further into political--and popular--culture. During the eighteen months of war and for an extended period after the armistice, military images and patriotic metaphors saturated popular culture, giving national values a poignancy unequaled in peacetime. The idea of nationhood and the concomitant understanding of the duties of citizenship; Americans' sense of themselves as a people and the perceived meaning of national traditions; even fundamental assumptions about the natures of female and male--heightened by wartime, such concepts reached into history and social tradition to touch basic meanings of identity and belonging. After the declaration of war, they found compelling expression in the symbolism and social events of popular culture, posing another opportunity for the suffrage campaign. On April 10, less than a week after the United States's entry into World War I, fifty Dallas suffragists carried flags in a "Patriotic Parade," marching behind a banner that read, "Men of America, We Will Do Our Share." (50) Among the DESA's most effective strategies were responses to specific events: both as individuals and as an organization, DESA members became active participants in the war effort.

Loyalty to the NAWSA, which had pledged itself to support the war weeks earlier, and undoubtedly personal conviction as well led the Dallas suffragists into patriotic activism. Accepting highly visible roles in the war effort, DESA leaders distanced themselves from critics of American entry into the war and specifically from the militant suffragists of the National Woman's Party. DESA press chairman Vernice Reppert was appointed Texas chairman of the Woman's Liberty Loan Committee of the Eleventh Federal Reserve District. Chairing the Woman's War Savings Stamp Committee, the former DESA president Texas Erwin Armstrong organized "thrift clubs," or war savings societies, throughout Dallas County. Incumbent DESA vice president Nona Boren Mahoney supervised savings stamps booths throughout the city. As Sara Hunter Graham has noted, war work offered the kind of "official government sanction" that could only benefit the suffragists' image. (51)

The DESA volunteered for the war effort as an organization, too. Recruiting women from several neighborhoods, the suffragists set up a Red Cross auxiliary and equipped a rented workroom with sewing machines for making surgical dressings and hospital gowns. Like numerous individual homeowners and civic groups, the DESA planted and tended a war garden and published a list of ways to use leftovers in response to the government's call for food conservation. Dallas and Dallas County suffragists worked together to design a "war dress," then contacted a pattern manufacturer who could supply the department stores. Made with an overall-like bib top and "a short riding skirt," the dress was meant to be practical for farming and gardening, "without sacrificing grace and dignity." (52)

Even charity work acquired a patriotic patina. Dividing into four teams, the suffragists spread throughout the city and collected more than $12,000 for the Federated Charities Finance Association's annual fund drive. Raising money for charity helped to emphasize the DESA's public role in city life and to confirm its image as an organization of community members who cared about the well-being of others and not just about their own cause. With war-related imagery seeping into virtually every area of community life, the Federated Charities' executive committee chairman sent a note to thank the DESA for "splendid cooperation in every patriotic enterprise." (53)

Clubwomen, too, were giving countless hours each week to the war effort--growing "victory gardens," sewing bandages and hospital gowns, knitting garments for servicemen and refugees, and running a canteen for soldiers stationed in Dallas at Camp Dick. As a practical matter, war work may have seemed to them simply an additional volunteer effort. By contrast, for the suffragists the war shaped, perhaps even dominated, their agenda. Suffrage Day at the State Fair in 1917 was also Liberty Loan Day. Four hundred TESA delegates, officers, and guests attended a "Patriotic Banquet" at the Adolphus Hotel, where the principal speaker praised women's war work and urged his audience to purchase Liberty Bonds. Alongside the suffrage literature and "novelties" for sale, the DESA's fair booth displayed specimens of European surgical bandages as well as instructions and materials for sewing them. The war effort worked its way into the DESA's regular Monday afternoon meetings, too. The suffragists listened to political addresses and discussed campaign tactics while knitting the association's quota of garments for the Red Cross to distribute to soldiers and European refugees. (54)

Just as it accepted the NAWSA's policies regarding the war effort, the DESA cast its campaign primarily within the parameters established by the national leaders. The basic strategies originated in New York, then were communicated to the local societies through the TESA headquarters in Austin. The Dallas suffragists also gathered ideas for activities during family vacations to larger cities, where they often took a few hours to visit suffragist offices. They found useful suggestions, too, in the speeches of leaders prominent in campaigns in other places, such as Minnesota, Illinois, California, Arkansas, and New York City. Funded by a special grant from the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission, professional organizers from the NAWSA offered training in political tactics and public speaking at a three-day "suffrage school" in Dallas. (55)

After four years of integrating their cause into community life, the DESA found a gratifying response from the city's women. In early March 1918 the antisuffragist state representative from Dallas, Barry Miller, made a promise he very likely did not expect to keep. If the suffragists could find 5,000 Dallas County women who wanted the ballot, he would vote for the bill to give women the right to vote in primary elections and party caucuses. Within six days the suffragists gathered more than 10,000 signatures. Confident of having proven their strength, the suffragists announced that they could spare no more time from their war work. Presented personally to Barry Miller before the Texas House of Representatives by DESA vice president Nona Mahoney, the petition won Miller's vote for the bill (as promised) and helped convince the legislature to extend partial suffrage to Texas women. (56)

In July, four months after the passage of the primary law, the suffragists again saw the impressive results of their campaign. With only seventeen days to register new voters for the gubernatorial primary election, DESA leaders were pleased with the women's turnout. Those who registered appeared to be a cross section of the white female population, including mill workers, office personnel, housewives, saleswomen, farm wives, and church women favoring Prohibition. By July 14 there were 16,809 Dallas County women legally registered to vote, and during the late registration period in early August, over 200 more pushed the total above 17,000. Outnumbering the women registered in any other Texas county, the new Dallas voters represented 51.5 percent of the eligible local women. (57)

The demographic profile of registered female voters carried a distinct implication for the campaign in Dallas: the DESA's strategy had been most effective among privileged housewives. Tabulation by precinct found Dallas women registered at the highest rates in middleclass and elite areas of the city, and in five precincts the new female voters outnumbered males. Only about half as many working-class women as men registered to vote. (58)

The numbers included no African Americans. In a few places in the state, black women used the registration period for implied, if not overt protest. Five hundred registered in Houston without incident, but the sheriff in Orange, approximately one hundred miles to the east, turned away a hundred other African American women who came to the courthouse. In Waxahachie, a town thirty miles south of Dallas, the county tax collector refused black women who came to register until a judge advised him of their rights. Dallas suffragists made no comment regarding the disfranchisement of African American women. Hoping to prevent its campaign from sinking beneath the South's most persistent social injustice, the DESA employed the official policy of both the state and national associations--evade the issue of African American suffrage. (59)

The year 1918 was a particularly shameful time to ignore African American aspirations to full citizenship, for the city's black women were devoting many hours each week to the war effort: they, too, had loved ones in uniform. With a club movement that was at least twenty years old, local African American women had all the reasons for voting that white clubwomen claimed, plus the desire to improve conditions for their race. The African American community was-well aware of the suffrage campaign, and the black-owned Dallas Express regularly reported the movement's progress and published articles favoring woman suffrage. (60)

White resistance to rising African American expectations intensified racial tension in Texas, yet the state's antisuffragists had little success in their attempts to inflame public opinion with racist propaganda. With the exception of certain southeastern counties, the relatively small size of the black population (17.7 percent statewide in 1910 and 16 percent in 1920) made African American demands less politically threatening in Texas than elsewhere in the South. (61) Moreover, white Texans had disfranchised black men in two ways. One barrier was the "white primary," a Democratic Party membership regulation that had the force of state law. The second was the poll tax, which disfranchised around three-fourths of potential African American voters. Both disabilities would apply to black women. (62)

African American men able to pay the poll tax were among Texas voters on May 24, 1919, in a referendum on four proposed amendments to the state constitution. One of the amendments would extend the full franchise to women; another would adopt Prohibition. In the weeks before the election, the Dallas business community responded with generosity to suffragist requests for support. Department stores made space available for "suffrage recruiting stations"--tables with suffragist brochures, petitions for supporters to sign, and instructions for voting. Restaurants, cafes, and hotel dining rooms added suffrage slogans to their menus; a printing firm produced suffrage literature free of charge; and a car sales company donated an automobile for campaigning in the rural areas of Dallas County. (63)

For a week before election day, movie theaters featured slides from the NAWSA's publicity department. Like New York City merchants whose stores lined the routes of suffrage parades and shop owners during the 1913 march in Washington, D.C., Dallas retailers adopted the suffragist colors and slogans for advertisements and window displays. "All the stores have a beautifully decorated suffrage window," Vernice Reppert wrote to TESA president Cunningham on the day before the referendum. "[A]ll of our papers have front page boxed editorials favoring suffrage both today and tomorrow; all of the dry goods stores are mentioning suffrage in their ads and all for love." Acquiring what amounted to donations in kind and free publicity, the DESA integrated woman suffrage into the commercial aspects of popular culture by recruiting business owners into the campaign. (64)

The issue dominated local political discussion, notwithstanding the other amendments on the ballot. Well before election day, a number of city leaders and public officeholders in Dallas County endorsed woman suffrage and advocated votes for women in speeches, addresses in the legislature, and statements to the press. The Morning News featured front-page cartoons depicting the suffragists as dignified and determined figures, while other Dallas periodicals also published suffrage news and supportive editorials, interviews with prominent local men, and favorable statements by such national figures as William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, and Secretary of Labor W. B. Wilson. (65)

The local referendum victory on May 24 appeared to be the reward for a campaign carefully attuned to its community. Voters in both the city and the county passed the woman suffrage amendment with 63 percent and 60 percent of the vote respectively. The Dallas press attributed the results to war work by hundreds of local women and gave little credit to the traditional assumptions of Prohibitionist support. Still, the issue seems to have affected the returns, though only one DESA officer also worked prominently for Prohibition. A hindrance to the cause of woman suffrage elsewhere, Prohibition was a benign factor in Dallas, as the urban progressive Democrats joined the city's evangelical churches in support of woman suffrage. (66) Statewide, on the other hand, thousands of voters separated the two issues and apparently disregarded both the years women had devoted to the dry movement and women's work for the war effort. Passing the Prohibition amendment by a comfortable margin, Texas men rejected woman suffrage 54 percent to 46 percent, or by more than 25,000 votes. (67)

As with Prohibition, neglecting White supremacy/states' rights seemed to do the DESA campaign little harm. Although never entirely ignored, issues involving race wielded only minor influence in the Dallas political culture. Still, both locally and statewide, the referendum outcome assumed racial as well as ethnic and class profiles. In a pattern repeated throughout Texas, voters in the city's predominantly African American and German neighborhoods rejected both Prohibition and woman suffrage. White wage earners tended to vote for Prohibition but against woman suffrage, while Jewish and Protestant men in the wealthier precincts approved both. (68) For men as for women, the DESA's campaign seemed most effective among the privileged and those who favored Progressive policies.

Lacking pre-election opinion surveys, exit polls, and interviews with individuals, we cannot estimate how many voters the suffrage campaign influenced directly. In view of the public support from the prominent and socially influential business owners, we can be sure the DESA succeeded in retaining the personal regard of the city's leadership, whatever the men's ambivalence toward Progressive policies in general. In a city where white-collar employees were approximately half the labor force, winning and retaining respect among the business owners was a crucial factor. Clergymen believed women would use the ballot to purify society, while merchants and bankers had no worries that the local suffragists harbored socialist sympathies. Progressive Democrats, of course, expected to gain women's votes for their candidates and support for their bills in the legislature. The secure suffrage victory among city and county voters implied a significant degree of success in adapting the national suffrage movement to community mores and expectations.

In Dallas, Texas, integrating woman suffrage into the occasions and symbolism of community life included, and in many ways depended upon, honoring the values of traditional female behavior. Put another way, propriety assumed the leading role in the Dallas campaign. Serving as the context for the suffragist message, propriety also gave form to its expression, shaping and honing the local presentation of the national cause. On explicitly female social occasions such as teas, receptions, and balls, as well as during community festivals and events of mass entertainment, the suffragists "spoke" as eloquently through personal behavior as through rational argument and reasoned persuasion. The women turned a social principle--propriety--into the basis of a political style and successfully employed that style to integrate the substance of their campaign into community life. (69)

With its uniquely long time span and its constant, year-round nature, the American suffrage movement used popular culture to center a political issue within social values. By means of well-known, even cherished customs and symbolism, societies like the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association developed local campaigns that expressed the issue in familiar metaphors, wove suffrage rhetoric into local political dialogues, and made the cause itself a participant in community events and public occasions. In some places, to be sure, the suffragists failed, losing to arguments for white supremacy and states' rights, perhaps, or to the irrational, elemental power of traditional gender assumptions. Regardless of success or failure, the local organizations did more than reflect the national movement. In the quest to share power through the acknowledged public capacity of the ballot, the suffragists developed their own political style and with it a unique expression of popular politics.

(1) For the "eclectic" political style of American suffragists see Michael McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power, 1830-1930," Journal of American History, 77 (December 1990), 864-85, esp. 869-80 (quotation on p. 869). I want to thank Jackie McElhaney, Judith N. McArthur, Elizabeth Hayes Turner, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History.

(2) For the political functioning of popular culture see John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston and other cities, 1989), 159, 161-69; for political uses of cultural forms see T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review, 90 (June 1985), 567-93, esp. 589.

(3) For differences between the NAWSA and state and local suffrage societies regarding campaign activities, see Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York, 1999), 57-58, 170-71. For the NAWSA's domination of the suffrage movement see Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven and London, 1996), 81-83, 86-90. For the importance of local suffrage societies see Janelle D. Scott, "Local Leadership in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Houston's Campaign for the Vote, 19171918," Houston Review, 12, no. 1 (1990), 3-22, esp. 21-22; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959; reprint, New York, 1974), 279-82; and David Morgan, Suffragists and Democrats: The Politics of Woman Suffrage in America (East Lansing, Mich., 1972), 85-86.

(4) "Dallas Has a Real Suffragette Club," Dallas Morning News, March 16, 1913, sec. 1, p. 10 (first and third quotations); "Texas Women Seek Use of Ballot Box," ibid., March 13, 1913, p. 20 (second quotation); Elizabeth York Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life: Dallas, Texas, 1843-1920 (College Station, Tex., 1998), 157-59. In Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), xv-xvi, 42-43, Elna C. Green notes that suffragists were more likely to come from urban families who had lived in cities or large towns for at least a generation than from farming or plantation-owning families.

(5) For the attitudes of the older clubwomen see History of the Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs, 1898-1936 (Dallas, 1937), 56-57. See also Elizabeth York Enstam, "They Called It `Motherhood': Dallas Women and Public Life, 1895-1918," in Virginia Bernhard et al., eds., Hidden Histories of Women in the New South (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1994), 71-95.

(6) Elizabeth Hayes Turner, "`White-Gloved Ladies' and `New Women' in the Texas Woman Suffrage Movement," in Virginia Bernhard et al., eds., Southern Women: Histories and Identities (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1992), 129-56; Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (New York and Oxford, 1990), 3-8, 14-21, 26-27, 212-14.

(7) For suffragist programs at fairs in other states see Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890-1920 (Tuscaloosa and London, 1992), 140-41; A. Elizabeth Taylor, "South Carolina and the Enfranchisement of Women: The Later Years," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 80 (October 1979), 300; Sharon Hartman Strom, "Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement: A New Perspective from Massachusetts," Journal of American History, 62 (September 1975), 303; and Dorinda Riessen Reed, The Woman Suffrage Movement in South Dakota (Vermillion, S.Dak., 1958), 65, 70, 87.

(8) The state suffrage organization's original name, Texas Woman Suffrage Association, was changed in 1916 to Texas Equal Suffrage Association to make male members feel welcome. For simplicity, I have used the final name only. "Officers Chosen by Texas Suffragists," Dallas Morning News, May 13, 1916, p. 8. For fair attendance figures and for Suffrage Day activities see "Suffrage Day Big Success," Dallas Times Herald, October 23, 1913, p. 1; "Mellow Autumn Day Brings Crowding Thousands to Fair," Dallas Morning News, October 24, 1913, p. 1 (quotations); "Attendance Records 1913 Fair Broken by Yesterday's [Saturday's] Crowd," Dallas Morning News, October 26, 1913, sec. 1, p. 1; and "Attendance at Fair Amounts to 701,345," Dallas Morning News, November 3, 1913, p. 1. For the "suffrage novelties" sold at the fair see "Women Pledge $5,800 for Equal Suffrage," Dallas Morning News, May 12, 1916, p. 4. For a general description of the State Fair of Texas see Nancy Wiley, The Great State Fair of Texas: An Illustrated History (Dallas, 1985), esp. 71-81.

(9) "Official Estimate Second Saturday Attendance 112,300," Dallas Morning News, October 24, 1915, sec. 1, p. 1; "Equal Suffrage Day Will Be Observed," ibid., October 23, 1915, p. 17 (first quotation); "Equal Suffrage Day Is Complete Success," ibid., October 24, 1915, sec. 1, p. 7; "Advocates of Equal Rights in Evidence," Dallas Times Herald, October 23, 1915, p. 2 (subsequent quotations).

(10) Wiley, Great State Fair of Texas, 71-81.

(11) First to identify the deeper cultural meanings of events usually classified as recreation was Clifford Geertz in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 412-53. For cultural meaning in regional recreation see Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), chaps. 4-5. For suffragists' May Day activities in Chicago, New York, Houston, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, Nashville, and Wilmington, Delaware, see "Thousands Celebrate Equal Suffrage Day," Dallas Morning News, May 3, 1914, sec. 4, p. 6; "Suffragists of the Nation Hold Many Parades Today," Dallas Times Herald, May 2, 1914, p. 2; and Carol E. Hoffecker, "Delaware's Woman Suffrage Campaign," Delaware History, 20 (Spring-Summer 1983), 154-55.

(12) First formulated by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the concept of hegemony has been fundamental to the thinking of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. See John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996), 1-8; and Lears, "Concept of Cultural Hegemony," 567-93.

(13) Stuart Hall sees popular culture as both an "arena of consent and resistance" and as one of the sites "where hegemony arises, and where it is secured." Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing `the Popular,'" in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), 227-40 (quotations on p. 239). See also Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself' Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, N.C., and London, 1997), 2-3, 7-8; and Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2, 4-5.

(14) For the social and political achievements of clubwomen in Dallas see Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, chaps. 6-8. For Texas clubwomen see Judith N. McArthur, Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918 (Urbana and Chicago, 1998); Jacquelyn Masur McElhaney, Pauline Periwinkle and Progressive Reform in Dallas (College Station, Tex., 1998); Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1997); and Megan Seaholm, "Earnest Women: The White Woman's Club Movement in Progressive Era Texas, 1880-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, 1988).

(15) The classic study of how women's voluntary associations altered American political dialogue is Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984), 620-47.

(16) History of the Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs, 8-9, 11, 32, 37, 48-52, 56-57; see also an unidentified booklet [History of the Dallas PTA], ca. 1970s, published by the Dallas City Council of Parent-Teacher Associations, pp. 5, 7-9, 11-12, in Dallas City Council of PTA Archives (Office of the PTA President, Dallas Independent School District Administration Building, Ross Avenue, Dallas, Tex.). For the progressive Dallas business leaders see Sam Acheson, Dallas Yesterday, ed. Lee Milazzo (Dallas, 1977), 168-78; "To Name Officers," Dallas Morning News, April 4, 1906, p. 5; and Bradley Robert Rice, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Austin and London, 1977). Regarding the confidence of Dallas clubwomen in the men's support see Ella (Mrs. P. P.) Tucker to the President of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, April 5, 1911, Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs Records (Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library, Dallas, Tex.; hereinafter cited as DPL).

(17) History of the Dallas Federation of Women's Clubs, 1-2, 6-7, 8-9, 11, 32, 48-52, 56-67, 89; McElhaney, Pauline Periwinkle and Progressive Reform in Dallas, 88-89, 110-16; Dallas Clubwoman, November 7 and 8, 1908, April 10, 1909, and March 12, 1910 (Dallas Historical Society): Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 148-51; Acheson, Dallas Yesterday, 172-78 (quotation on p. 175). Progressive Democrats elsewhere tended to support the clubwomen's policy agenda only on occasion; see Maureen A. Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman's City Club in Chicago in the Progressive Era," American Historical Review, 95 (October 1990), 1032-50, esp. 1032-33. For a discussion of city governments and the uses of public money see Rice, Progressive Cities, 69-70, 86.

(18) Jackie McElhaney and Michael V. Hazel, "Dallas, Texas," in Ron Tyler et al., eds., The New Handbook of Texas (6 vols.; Austin, 1996), II, 478-81. The vast majority of Texans counted in the 1850 and 1860 censuses were born in southern states; it stands to reason that Dallas reflected this statewide pattern. The Seventh Census: Report of the Superintendent of the Census (Washington, D.C., 1853), 16-19; Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864), 490. For the ways white men used white women to maintain the social hierarchy and to deprive African Americans of their rights, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "`You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 439-65, esp. 448, 451; and Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 1974), 112, 129-30, 141-57, 194-97.

(19) For the historical priority of gender discrimination see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 13-17, 33-41, 45, 55-58, 72-74, 109-10, 133-36, 368-73.

(20) Among the progressive statutes was a law passed in 1911 giving married women the right to conduct business as femes sole, and another in 1913 that increased a matron's control of her separate property. Ocie Speer, A Treatise on the Law of Marital Rights in Texas, Including Marriage, Divorce, Children, Community Property, Homestead, Administration and Death Actions (Rochester, N.Y., 1916), 139-41, 163, 235, 292-93, 323-32, 368-70; Loy M. Simpkins, ed., Texas Family Law with Forms: Speer's Fifth Edition, Sections 15:1-34:8 (San Francisco, 1976), 595-99; McArthur, Creating the New Woman, 101-4; Kathleen Elizabeth Lazarou, "Concealed Under Petticoats: Married Women's Property and the Law of Texas, 1840-1913" (Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, 1980), 170-73. For the Texas Democratic Party in this period see Judith N. McArthur, "Minnie Fisher Cunningham's Back Door Lobby in Texas: Political Maneuvering in a One-Party State," in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, Oreg., 1995), 315-31; and Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin and London, 1973), 25-26, 36-39.

(21) A list of all equal suffrage societies in Texas can be found in A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas," in Ruthe Winegarten and Judith N. McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas (Austin, 1987), 30 n. 50. For DESA members sent to neighboring counties to advise groups in Fort Worth, Denison, Tyler, McKinney, and Greenville, see Annette Finnigan to Texas Armstrong, July 15, 1914, Finnigan to Ireline DeWitt, December 10, 1914, DeWitt to Finnigan, December 16, 1914, Finnigan to Mrs. N. C. Lindsey, December 24, 1914, Finnigan to DeWitt, n.d. [1914], and Finnigan to DeWitt, December 18, 1914, all in Folder 3, Box 10, Part I, Jane Y. McCallum Papers (Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Tex.).

(22) Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 86-90; "Out Line for County Campaigns," Folder 122, Box 9, Minnie Fisher Cunningham Papers (Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Tex.) (quotations).

(23) For clubwomen's attitudes toward politics see Enstam, "They Called It `Motherhood,'" 72-75, 78, 87-88; and Turner, "`White-Gloved Ladies' and `New Women' in the Texas Woman Suffrage Movement," 129-56. For nationwide voluntarist politics see Baker, "Domestication of Politics," 620-47; and McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power," 864, 867-69, 871. In their introduction to Women, Politics, and Change (New York, 1990), 14, Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin comment that women won the vote at the time when elections were less important in the American system than pressure group politics. For the theoretical problems raised by confining the definitions of politics to public office, voting, and elections, see Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform," 1033-34, 1046, 1048-50; and Nancy F. Cott, "What's in a Name? The Limits of `Social Feminism'; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History," Journal of American History, 76 (December 1989), 809-29, esp. 815, 820-23, 826.

(24) Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910. Vol. IV: Population, 1910: Occupation Statistics (Washington, D.C., 1914), 221,223, 225; Fourteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1920. Vol. IV: Population, 1920: Occupation Statistics (Washington, D.C., 1923), 158, 160, 162. Roughly 70 percent of the female population in Dallas was not employed in 1910 and 1920; therefore, the status of most women must be determined from the men's occupational profile. Although "white-collar" and "middle class" are not, nor ever have been, strictly synonymous, historians usually associate them for descriptive purposes. The classic studies for the definition of the American middle class are Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1989); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1981).

(25) Thirteenth Census, 1910, IV, 221, 223, 225; Fourteenth Census, 1920, IV, 150-66. I have included the following occupational categories from the census under the descriptive term white-collar: under Trade--bankers, brokers, moneylenders; clerks in stores; commercial travelers; decorators, drapers, and window-dressers; floorwalkers and foremen in stores; inspectors, gaugers, and samplers in stores; insurance agents; proprietors, officials, and managers; real estate agents; retail dealers; salespeople; and wholesalers; under Transportation--proprietors and managers of transfer companies; telegraph and telephone operators; and other proprietors, officials, and managers; under Public Service--detectives, probation and truant officers; and city, county, state, and U.S. inspectors; all professional service occupations (minus those considered traditionally female--described below); and all clerical occupations. Of the remaining Dallas women in the labor force, 19.6 percent in 1910 were employed in such traditionally female occupations in manufacturing (apprentices [presumably any female "apprentice" worked in the dressmaking trade]; semiskilled workers in clothing, food, and textile industries; non-factory dressmakers and seamstresses; milliners; and tailoresses); and in professional service (artists and art teachers; musicians and music teachers; physicians; teachers; and trained nurses). In 1920 approximately 15 percent of women worked in traditionally female occupations in manufacturing (apprentices to dressmakers and milliners; bakers; semiskilled workers in broom, brush, and button factories, clothing industries, cotton mills, and other textile mills; non-factory dressmakers and seamstresses; managers and superintendents; manufacturers and officials; milliners; and tailoresses); and in professional service (artists and art teachers; college professors; healers; "keepers" of charitable and penal institutions; musicians and music teachers; osteopaths; physicians; teachers; and trained nurses). DESA leaders were not successful in recruiting employed women into membership: Marguerite Reagan Davis to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, November 11, 1915, Folder 1, Box 12a, Part II, McCallum Papers; and "Equal Suffrage Board Plans Mass Meeting," Dallas Morning News, February 10, 1915, p. 8. For one suffragist's observation regarding blue-collar women's attitudes toward the vote, see "Women Voters Here Now Number 4182," Dallas Morning News, July 3, 1918, p. 8. For hopes to organize white-collar employed women see "Meeting of Advocates of Equal Suffrage," ibid., May 11, 1915, p. 9; and "Business Women May Form Organizations," ibid., April 6, 1916, p. 7. For a discussion of the suffragists, class differences, and recruiting blue-collar women see Ellen Carol DuBois, "Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894-1909," Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), 34-58.

(26) The 1910 percentages include the following as occupations in textile and clothing industries: non-factory dressmakers and seamstresses; milliners; semiskilled workers in textile industries; sewers and sewing machine operators; and tailoresses. The 1920 percentages include the following as occupations in textile and clothing industries: apprentices to dressmakers and milliners; non-factory dressmakers and seamstresses; semiskilled workers in clothing industries, textile industries, and "other" textile mills; milliners; and tailoresses. Thirteenth Census, 1910, IV, 221,223, 225; Fourteenth Census, 1920, IV, 152, 156. Originally founded in Dallas in 1898 as the United States Garment Workers Local No. 45, then reorganized in 1907 and revived in 1913 as Local 240, the Union Label League grew from the fifteen garment workers who wore white dresses and carried white parasols while riding in open cars in the 1910 Labor Day parade to more than two hundred marchers in white dresses and red caps in the 1917 parade. For the history of this union see Dallas City Directory for 1900 (Dallas, 1900), 58; "Garment Workers," [Dallas] laborer, July 20, 1907, p. 4 (DPL); and "Union Label League to Meet," Dallas Morning News, September 20, 1913, p. 4. For the Labor Day parades see "Many March in Labor Day Parade," Dallas Morning News, September 6, 1910, p. 1; and "Hold Big Labor Day Celebration Here," ibid., September 4, 1917, p. 16. The best and most recent study of suffragists and blue-collar women is DuBois, "Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance," 34-58; see also Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven and London, 1997), esp. 75-76, 93-95, 111-18.

(27) Thirteenth Census, 1910, IV, 221, 223, 225; Fourteenth Census, 1920, IV, 158-66. In 1910, trade and transportation industries employed 36.6 percent of the city's male labor force, with a small increase by 1920 to 37.3 percent. The largest single block of male employees were in manufacturing, 31.2 percent in 1910 and 30.4 percent in 1920; some occupations in this category also involved office or managerial work. Only 11 percent of employed men were in clerical occupations in 1910 and just 14 percent in 1920; while another 20 percent in 1910 and 16 percent in 1920 were in public, domestic, and professional service. Approximately two-thirds of the men working in trade and transportation according to the 1910 and 1920 census could be considered as having "white-collar" occupations. (These include the same categories counted as white-collar in n. 25, plus railroad officials, ticket agents, and express company agents.) Combining occupations from other categories that were managerial in nature (manufacturing officials; architects' apprentices; detectives; probation and truant officers; and city, county, state, and U.S. inspectors) with all cleric, al jobs and professional service occupations shows that white-collar positions comprised 34.3 percent of all male occupations in 1910 and 45 percent in 1920. Thirteenth Census, 1910, IV, 221,223, 225; Fourteenth Census, 1920, IV, 150-66.

(28) "Women to Compete for Prizes," Dallas Morning News, February 23, 1916, p. 3 (quotations); "Thousands Attend Spring Festival," ibid., March 2, 1916, pp. 1, 3. For mention of suffragist participation in various types of local parades elsewhere see A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 15 (Spring 1956), 26; Taylor, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee (New York, 1957; reprint, New York, 1978), 53; and Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 38 (January 1961), 51. In her exploration of suffragists' relationship with consumer-commercial culture, Margaret Finnegan particularly discusses their fashion-consciousness. Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 18-24.

(29) "`The Polynesian Princess' Suffrage Play, to Combine Fashion with Dramatic Art," Dallas Times Herald, January 28, 1917, sec. 1, p. 9 (first, second, and third quotations); "'Polynesian Princess' to Be Presented Here," Dallas Morning News, January 28, 1917, sec. 4, p. 4; "Suffrage Play to Be Attraction Tonight," Dallas Morning News, January 31, 1917, p. 9; "`Polynesian Princess,' Suffrage Benefit Distinct Success," Dallas Times Herald, February 1, 1917, p. 6 (fourth quotation). Suffragists in other states, too, held musical programs, teas, and banquets to raise money; see A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly, 36 (July 1957), 52.

(30) "Will Invite Governor to Suffrage Ball," Dallas Morning News, February 9, 1919, sec. 2, p. 12. For a similar fund-raising event see Lee N. Allen, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Alabama, 1910-1920," Alabama Review, 11 (April 1958), 86.

(31) "Much Entertainment Planned for Women [during Cattleman's Convention]," Dallas Morning News, March 9, 1919, sec. 2, p. 3; "First Suffrage Tea Is Given in Dallas," ibid., December 14, 1913, sec. 4, p. 9; "Equal Suffrage Is Discussed," ibid., February 5, 1916, p. 9; "Many Attend Suffrage Tea," ibid., June 16, 1916, p. 15; "Declare Women Are Prepared for Vote," ibid., June 24, 1916, p. 5. For suffrage teas elsewhere see A. Elizabeth Taylor, "Woman Suffrage Activities in Atlanta," Atlanta Historical Journal, 23 (Winter 1979), 49; Taylor, "Woman Suffrage Movement in Arkansas," 37; Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, 53; and Dina M. Young, "The Silent Search for a Voice: The St. Louis Equal Suffrage League and the Dilemma of Elite Reform, 1910-1920," Gateway Heritage, 8 (Spring 1988), 10. In 1900 the NAWSA adopted the explicit policy of concentrating recruitment among privileged women. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 36-37, 51-54.

(32) Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself, 1-2. On the suffragists and popular politics see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 52.

(33) For male discomfort with women's activism in civic reform see Helene Silverberg, "`A Government of Men': Gender, the City, and the New Science of Politics," in Helene Silverberg, ed., Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years (Princeton, 1998), 156-84; and for political scientists on the issue see Mary G. Dietz and James Farr, "`Politics Would Undoubtedly Unwoman Her': Gender, Suffrage, and American Political Science," in ibid., 61-85.

(34) Quotation in Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 36.

(35) DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, 4; Mathews and De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA, 6-21.

(36) Marguerite Reagan Davis to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, November 11, 1915, Folder 1, Box 12a, Part II, McCallum Papers (quotation). For forms of nonverbal discourse see Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 8. For discussion of the conventions of the southern lady as "New Woman," see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Scarlett O'Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman," in Catherine Clinton, ed., Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past (Durham, N.C., and London, 1994), 154-79, esp. 157-68; and Anne Firor Scott, "The `New Woman' in the New South," in Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana and Chicago, 1984), 212-21.

(37) McGerr observes that "the dichotomy of style and substance is false; the two are bound together. The substance of politics--by which we usually mean major policy questions--does not exist in isolation. Issues do not appear out of thin air; they are shaped by political style, by the ways that politicians, parties, pressure groups, and media define, present, or ignore them. Political style acts as a kind of filtering lens that colors some objects, reshapes others, and obscures many altogether." McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power," 865.

(38) See, for example, Vernice Reppert's comments about Katherine Jalonick to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, May 20 and 30, 1917, Folder 188, Box 13, Cunningham Papers.

(39) "Suffragists to Appear in Torchlight Parade," Dallas Morning News, June 27, 1916, p. 7; "Dallas Democrats to Celebrate Tonight," ibid., June 29, 1916, p. 5. In Houston and Galveston, rallies proved to be popular despite initial reluctance among the Galveston membership to do anything so bold. See Minnie Fisher Cunningham to Perle Penfield, July 10, 1914, and Penfield to Cunningham, August 11, 1914, Folder 2, Box 11a, Part II, McCallum Papers; and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, "From Private Entertainments to Public Rallies: The Transformation of the Texas Woman Suffrage Movement" (paper presented at the Ninth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1993; copy in the author's possession). For parades and outdoor rallies in Nashville see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 66.

(40) "Child Welfare Day at Fair," Dallas Morning News, November 1, 1913, p. 3; "Three Babies Tie for First Honor," ibid., October 23, 1917, p. 6; McArthur, Creating the New Woman, 105, 181 n. 25.

(41) According to Hall, popular culture includes "many things which don't usually figure in the discussion of `culture' at all," such as basic values and common assumptions about economic and political institutions as well as the social structures of everyday life. Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the `Popular,'" 230--31 (quotation on p. 230). Also see Lawrence Grossberg, "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (Summer 1986), 61-77.

(42) "Pay High Tribute to Name of Mother," Dallas Morning News, May 10, 1909, p. 4; "No Special Program for Mother's Day," ibid., May 7, 1913, p. 4. My thanks to Judith N. McArthur for alerting me to the Mother's Day events in Dallas. See also Arleen Leibowitz, "Women's Work in the Home," in Cynthia B. Lloyd, ed., Sex, Discrimination, and the Division of Labor (New York and London, 1975), 223-43, esp. 224; and Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 94, chap. 7. For the relationship of maternalist values, the clubwomen's social policies, and Progressive politics see Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830-1930," in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York and London, 1993), 43-93, esp. 44-46; and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1992), ix-x, 11-13, 20-21. See also Reed, Woman Suffrage Movement in South Dakota, 90.

(43) Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2-4 (quotation on p. 2).

(44) Ibid., 2-4 (quotations on p. 4).

(45) Enstam, "They Called It `Motherhood,'" 71-72, 81, 88-89, 93-94.

(46) [Mary K. Craig], "Pioneer Southern Woman Tells Why She Became a Suffragist," Dallas Times Herald, June 10, 1917, sec. 1, p. 9 (first quotation); "Says Political Dominance of Men an Evil to the Mothers," ibid., September 2, 1917, sec. 1, p. 6 (second and third quotations); "Says Woman's Instinct Is Needed to Rule the World," ibid., December 9, 1917, sec. 1, p. 11 (fourth quotation); "Women Should Have Hand in Legislation Affecting the Home," ibid., February 10, 1918, sec. 1, p. 9; "Says Women in Home Should Have Voice in Government," ibid., June 24, 1917, sec. 1, p. 11; "Says There Is Need of the Mother Heart in Legislation," ibid., July 22, 1917, sec. 1, p. 9.

(47) "Life Members of Texas Congress of Mothers," Dallas Morning News, April 2, 1916, sec. 4, p. 8; "Head of W. O. W. Favors Woman Suffrage," ibid., April 13, 1919, sec. 3, p. 4 (first quotation); Charles B. Metcalfe to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, February 10, 1918 (second quotation), and Metcalfe to Cunningham, April 12, 1918, both in Folder 213, Box 14, Cunningham Papers.

(48) For Dallas clubwomen's alliance as mothers with the Prohibitionists in April 1916 see Enstam, "They Called It `Motherhood,'" 89-91.

(49) On December 13, 1918, Vernice Reppert wrote to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, "If the State [woman suffrage] Amendment comes before the Prohibition Amendment, we will have the support of the prohibitionists; and if the two amendments are voted on at the same time the prohibitionists will support us, but after they have secured state wide prohibition their ardor for suffrage will probably cool, and should we go into a state campaign later we may not have their support." This letter is in Folder 2, Box 3, Part I, McCallum Papers. For the case against the Texas Brewers' Association see The Brewers and Texas Politics (2 vols.; San Antonio, 1916). For alcoholic beverages and the State Fair of Texas see "To Exclude Fair Park from Saloon Limits," Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1916, p. 16; "Enough Signatures Obtained by [Mothers'] Council," ibid., February 15, 1916, p. 6; and "Franchise Amendment Majority on Returns 475," ibid., April 5, 1916, pp. 1, 14. For the local option election see "Dallas County Goes Dry by Majority of Nearly Two Thousand Votes," ibid., September 11, 1917, p. 1. For suffrage and Prohibition statewide see McArthur, Creating the New Woman, 115-16, 132-34; and for suffragists and Prohibition in other states see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 69, 114. For Prohibition and Texas politics see Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists, 26-27, chap. 2: and Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville, 1983), 100-102.

(50) "Patriotic Parade in Dallas Today," Dallas Morning News, April 10, 1917, p. 16; "10,000 in Parade to Show Loyalty," ibid., April 11, 1917, p. 8 (banner quotation).

(51) Vernice Reppert to Minnie Fisher Cunningham (telegram), June 7, 1917, Reppert to Cunningham, November 30, 1917, and Reppert to Cunningham, n.d., all in Folder 4, Box 3, Part I, McCallum Papers; "Organization of Women for Thrift Campaign Completed," Dallas Morning News, March 4, 1918, p. 7; "Women Continue to Report Good Sales of Thrift Stamps," ibid., May 9, 1918, p. 4; "Women to Continue War Savings Booths," ibid., May 12, 1918, sec. 4, p. 9. Regarding the "government sanction" earned by war work see Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 99-105 (quotation on p. 105); and Flexner, Century of Struggle, 283-84.

(52) Katherine Jalonick to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, December 3, 1917, Vernice Reppert to Cunningham, May 7, 1917, and n.d., all in Folder 71, Box 6, Cunningham Papers; "Suffragists to Plant Garden in Vacant Lot," Dallas Morning News, March 5, 1918, p. 8; "Suffragists Join Red Cross," ibid., May 3, 1917, p. 7; ibid., August 23, 1918, p. 4 (beneath the Red Cross Seal); "Plan `War Dress' for Women," ibid., May 5, 1917, p. 7 (quotations).

(53) "Suffrage Petitions Get Many Signatures," Dallas Morning News, March 3, 1918, p. 16. The Federated Charities Finance Association was a city government office that functioned as an umbrella agency to organize the numerous charitable groups and coordinate services and fundraising. Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 131.

(54) Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 163; "Suffragists to Hold Big Banquet on October 23," Dallas Morning News, October 12, 1917, p. 16; "Banquet at Adolphus for Suffragists," Dallas Times Herald, October 24, 1917, p. 7; "Four Hundred Persons Attend Suffrage Meet," Dallas Times Herald, October 25, 1917, p. 7; "Will Organize Surgical Dressings Auxiliary Here," Dallas Morning News, October 25, 1917, p. 8. For knitting during meetings see "Sumners Speaks to Suffragists on War," Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1917, p. 8.

(55) For the family vacations see Ireline DeWitt to Annette Finnigan, April 21, 1914, and Texas Armstrong to Finnigan, June 12 and 26, 1914, all in Folder 3, Box 10, Part I, McCallum Papers. Among the visiting speakers was California suffragist Helen Todd. "Noted Suffrage Orator Will Speak Here Today," Dallas Morning News, January 18, 1915, p. 12; "Address Delivered on Equal Suffrage," ibid., January 19, 1915, p. 6. When Florence Kelley, the first executive director of the National Consumers' League, spoke in Dallas as the guest of a civic organization, she stressed her support for woman suffrage. "Miss Florence Kelley Lectures in Dallas," ibid., February 9, 1914, p. 8. Most popular of the visiting speakers was Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who had spoken in Dallas on three previous occasions. Ibid., April 8, 1919, p. 17. For NAWSA visitors and the "suffrage school" see "Prominent Suffrage Leaders Are Guests," ibid., February 4, 1916, p. 16; "Suffrage School Will Open Today," ibid., March 1, 1917, p. 16; "Advertise Suffrage Cause, Woman Urges," ibid., March 3, 1917, p. 7; "Suffrage Organizer Speaks at Luncheon," ibid., March 17, 1917, p. 6; "Suffrage Association Head Tells of Washington Visit," ibid., May 30, 1917, p. 16. Established by NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Cart, the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission administered the money bequeathed to Catt by Miriam Leslie specifically for the suffrage campaign. Ida Husted Harper, ed., The History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. V: 1900-1920 (New York, 1922; reprint, New York, 1969), 755.

(56) Vernice Reppert to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, November 9, 1917, Folder 2, Box 3, Part I, McCallum Papers. Later, Miller accepted leadership of both the suffrage caucus in the legislature and the men's division of the equal suffrage league. "75 Legislators Decide on Spirited Suffrage Campaign," Dallas Morning News, May 7, 1919; "Governor to Address Equal Suffrage Rally," Dallas Morning News, May 20, 1919, p. 12. For the petition drive and its presentation see "Equal Suffragists to Petition Legislature," Dallas Morning News, March 5, 1918, p. 5; "Suffragists' Drive Goes Beyond 8000," ibid., March 10, 1918, sec. 4, p. 2; "Suffrage Leaders Jubilant When 10,000 Dallas County Women Sign Petitions Asking Right to Vote," Dallas Times Herald, March 12, 1918, p. 9; Jane Y. McCallum, "Activities of Women in Texas Politics," in Frank Carter Adams, ed., Texas Democracy: A Centennial History of Politics and Personalities of the Democratic Party, 1836-1936 (4 vols.; Austin, 1937), I, 478-81; "Equal Bill Is Passed by House," Dallas Morning News, March 16, 1918, pp. 1, 5. See also Cunningham to Carrie Chapman Catt, January 25, 1918, in Winegarten and McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last, 165-67; and Taylor, "Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas," 37-38.

(57) "305 Women Voters Register First Day," Dallas Morning News, June 27, 1918, p. 7; "Today Is Last Day for Women to Register," ibid., July 12, 1918, p. 7; "Probably Million Voters in Texas," ibid., July 13, 1918, p. 1; "13,060 Women Voters in City of Dallas," ibid., July 14, 1918, sec. 2, p. 8; "Registration Booth Opened for Women," ibid., August 6, 1918, p. 14; "Forty More Dallas Women Registered," ibid., August 9, 1918, p. 4; Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 165.

(58) For precinct by precinct results see "Women Voters Outnumber Men in Five Boxes," Dallas Times Herald, July 14, 1918, sec. 1, p. 8. For the locations of specific precincts see Order of Commissioner's Court of Dallas County, Texas: Changing and Establishing the Various Election Precincts in Dallas County and Appointing Presiding Judges (Austin, 1916), copy in DPL. Nona Mahoney reported considerable interest in suffrage among blue-collar women, although she did not distinguish between homemakers and the employed: "Suffragist Drive Will Close Today," Dallas Morning News, March 9, 1918, p. 7. Suffragists and their friends made special efforts to seek out blue-collar women: each evening throughout the voter registration period, a social worker took eight to twelve mill workers to the courthouse to register after the mills closed. "Registration Booths in Front of Stores," Dallas Morning News, July 11, 1918, p. 14.

(59) "Negro Women Not Allowed to Register at Orange," Dallas Morning News, July 9, 1918, p. 2; "10,000 Women Have Registered in Houston," ibid., July 10, 1918, p. 2; [Judge] G. C. Groce to M. M. Crane, July 9, 1918, Box 3N98, Martin McNulty Crane Papers, 1834-1973 (Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin). To date, scholarship indicates that only in Nashville, Tennessee, did white and black suffragists form an alliance; see Anita Shafer Goodstein, "A Rare Alliance: African American and White Women in the Tennessee Elections of 1919 and 1920," Journal of Southern History, 64 (May 1998), 219-46. For Texas suffragists and the issue of white supremacy see McArthur, Creating the New Woman, 112, 114-15. For antisuffragists and race elsewhere see Suzanne Lebsock, "Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study," in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana and Chicago, 1993), 62-100, esp. 64-66, 68-79; and Sara Hunter Graham, "Woman Suffrage in Virginia: The Equal Suffrage League and Pressure-Group Politics, 1909-1920," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 101 (April 1993), 227-50. Also see Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, "The Problem of Race in Women's History," in Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming To Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York and London, 1989), 122-33; Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists, 24-25, 134; and Green, Southern Strategies, xv, 10-11, 91-98. Another example of the power of the states' rights/white supremacy argument can be found in Thomas, New Woman in Alabama, 196-202.

(60) Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 110, 132; "A Moment with the Conductor," Dallas Express, March 6, 1920, p. 5; "[African American] Women Organize Voters League [in Houston]," Dallas Express, October 18, 1919, pp. 1, 13.

(61) Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910. Vol. III: Population, 1910: Reports by States, Nebraska-Wyoming (Washington, D.C., 1913), 804; Fourteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1920. Vol. III Population, 1920: Composition and Characteristics of the Population by States (Washington, D.C., 1922), 984. The total numbers of African Americans in Dallas were as follows: in 1900 there were 9,063 in a population of 42,638, or 21 percent; in 1910 there were 18,024 in a population of 92,104, or 19.6 percent; in 1920 there were 24,023 in a population of 158,976, or 15.1 percent. Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900. Vol. I: Population, Part 2 (Washington, D.C., 1902), 127; Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910. Vol. I: Population, 1910 (Washington, D.C., 1913), 223: Fourteenth Census, 1920, III, 1015. See also Alwyn Barr, Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876-1906 (Austin and London, 1971), 199-201, 204-8.

(62) For the white primary see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood, N.Y., 1979); and Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York, 1963), 111-13. For the Dallas County white primary see Dallas Morning News, July 21, 1918, sec. 1, p. 12. Gould, in Progressives and Prohibitionists, 48-49, notes that at most one-fourth of African American men in Texas could vote. Regarding African American men and woman suffrage see Green, Southern Strategies, xv, 98-100.

(63) The other two amendments would raise the governor's salary and allow the state to use tax money to help heads of families purchase or improve their homes. The texts of the amendments can be found in "State Returns Are Far from Complete," Dallas Morning News, May 25, 1919, sec. I, pp. 1, 6. For Dallas business community support see "Women Assigned for Suffrage Recruiting Stations," ibid., May 15, 1919, p. 20; "Suffragists Will Continue to Fight," ibid., May 31, 1919, p. 11; and Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life, 167. For commercial support elsewhere, such as displays of suffrage literature and voter information in department stores, see Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 27-28, 45, 66-71.

(64) Vernice Reppert to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, May 23, 1919, Folder 188, Box 13, Cunningham Papers (quotation). Examples of the boxed editorials are "An Appeal to the Friends of Suffrage," Dallas Morning News, May 23, 1919, p. 1; and "Vote For Justice," Dallas Times Herald, May 23, 1919, p. 1. For alliances of suffragists and leading businessmen in other cities see Young, "Silent Search for a Voice," 8-9; and Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 66.

(65) Vernice Reppert to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, May 7, 1919, Folder 188, Box 13, Cunningham Papers; "Favor Equal Suffrage for Women of Texas," Dallas Morning News, May 11, 1919, sec. 2, p. 7; "Leading Citizens Urge Adoption of Suffrage," ibid., May 14, 1919, p. 8; "Speaker of Texas House Favors Suffrage for Women," ibid., May 16, 1919, p. 9; "Governor to Speak at Suffrage Rally," ibid., May 21, 1919, p. 9. For the cartoons see "They Served the Nation Together, But ...," ibid., May 19, 1919, p. 1; and "Delayed," ibid., May 31, 1919, p. 1.

(66) "Dallas County Election Returns," Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1919, p. 4; Winegarten and McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last, 190. For statements by the city's religious leaders in support of both woman suffrage and the Prohibition amendments, see "Three Bishops For Woman Suffrage," Dallas Morning News, May 18, 1919, sec. 1, p. 9. Included were Episcopal bishop Alexander C. Garrett, Catholic bishop Joseph P. Lynch, Methodist bishop E. D. Mouzon, Rabbi Dr. William H. Greenberg, Presbyterian J. Frank Smith, and Baptist George W. Truett. Only one DESA officer, Stella White (Mrs. Wendell) Spence, also worked actively for Prohibition. Interview with Stella Spence's daughter-in-law, Ruth Potts Spence, by the author, June 10, 1984.

(67) The final result was 141,773 for the amendment and 166,893 against: Winegarten and McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last, 183, 189-92. Statewide, analysts attributed the amendment's defeat to three ethnic groups--African Americans and German and Mexican immigrants--but also to native-born white farmers in the northeastern counties. "Defeat of Woman Suffrage Seems Practically Assured," Dallas Morning News, May 28, 1919, p. 1; Vernice Reppert to Minnie Fisher Cunningham, June 7, 1919, and Cunningham to Reppert, June 17, 1919, both in Folder 4, Box 3, Part I, McCallum Papers. See also "Many Factors Contributed to the Apparent Defeat of Suffrage," in Winegarten and McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last, 188-89. One month later, however, the Texas legislature ratified the federal woman suffrage amendment. Winegarten and McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last, 193.

(68) For location of specific precincts, see Order of Commissioners' Court; and for referendum returns by precinct see "Dallas County Election Returns," Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1919, p. 4.

(69) Propriety would appear to belong with Stuart Hall's concept of popular culture. See n. 41.

MS. ENSTAM is an independent scholar working in Dallas.