Elizabeth Hayes Turner

In Texas Women, the authors, who have been researching the world of women in the Lone Star State for over thirty years, continue their documentation of the heritage and influence of Texas' pioneering women by presenting biographies of twenty-four noted women of Texas, from the nineteenth-century writer Jane Cazneau to twentieth-century politician Kay Bailey Hutchinson.

Why in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did middle- and upper-class southern women-black and white-advance from the private worlds of home and family into public life, eventually transforming the cultural and political landscape of their community? Using Galveston as a case study, Elizabeth Hayes Turner asks who where the women who became activists and eventually led to progressive reforms and the women sufferage movement. Turner discovers that a majority of them came from particular congregations, but class status had as much to do with reofrm as did religious motivation.