Mothers of a Nation

Walking into the south foyer of the Texas Capitol, two marble figures immediately greet you: Stephen F. Austin, “the Father of Texas,” and Sam Houston, the first president of Texas during its brief tenure as an independent republic. These two men loom large in the imagination of the state, and their alabaster likenesses, perched at an entrance of one of the most storied buildings in all of Texas, do much to extend their legacies in perpetuity.

But a closer look at the statues reveals what is true for literally every man in this world: a woman is credited with their creation.

Elisabet Ney, a famed German sculptor who took up residence in Texas in the 1870s, was commissioned to create the statues in the early 1890s. She chose to make each statue the actual height of its subject: five-foot-seven for Austin and six-foot-two for Houston. This artistic decision defied the conventions of the medium, which usually saw artists creating literally larger-than-life figures. When the curator of the National Statuary Hall—where versions of the statues also reside—criticized the difference in size between the figures, Ney shot back at him, “If you are dissatisfied about them, you should take the matter up with God.”

Deeper in the Capitol building hangs a portrait of Ann Richards. Before she became the state’s second female governor, she charmed the country during her 1988 Democratic National Convention speech using some of that famed Texas wit. Wearing pearls, a perfectly coiffed bouffant and a puckish grin, she gently eviscerated then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, saying of the privileged East Coaster who called Texas home for part of his life, “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

These clever retorts align with the stereotypical imagining of a Texas woman: brassy and brash yet groomed and genteel, an amalgam of contradictory qualities that somehow produces a charming character.

With traits like these, it would be tempting to say that if Texas were flesh and blood, women are the heart. You could even make a winning case that they’re the brains. But really, they are a more basic, foundational component: the cardiovascular network, carrying the oxygen, nutrients and other building blocks of life, such as knowledge and culture to every corner of the state.

•••

Driving along the tens of thousands of miles of highway in Texas, the influence of women can be seen everywhere.

Let’s start with the wildflowers dotting the sides of the road. Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, who served as First Lady during the mid-1960s, made it her personal mission to beautify highways across the country. Growing up in the Piney Woods of East Texas—or “behind the Pine Curtain,” as locals would say—Lady Bird learned to love nature, which she called her “first and most reliable companion.” When her husband, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Highway Beautification Act into law in 1965, it was a capstone achievement in a long campaign to keep highways from being blighted by billboards and roadside junkyards. Lady Bird later founded the National Wildflower Research Center (later renamed after her) in Austin, which is committed to restoring roadsides across the state.

Down in Galveston, a different, historical beautification effort has taken place. The city, situated on an island strip, is exposed to the tempestuous Gulf of Mexico, where tropical storms often whip up enough energy to become hurricanes. Galveston’s proximity to these weather events has caused its population to dwindle over the years, but once it was the largest city in Texas, and it served temporarily as the capitol of the republic. It was during these halcyon days—specifically, on September 8, 1900—that a hurricane devastated the island, killing anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 people. Parts of Galveston sat under 15 feet of water, and the rush of saltwater drowned virtually all of its flora. In an effort to rebuild the city, the Women’s Health Protective Association, a group of 66 women, eventually replanted 10,000 trees. Then, on September 13, 2008, a hurricane once again decimated the landscape, destroying more than 40,000 trees—many of which were the same ones planted after the 1900 storm. And once again, a group of women took up the mission to replant thousands of trees to replace the city’s lost canopy. (Another local resident, Donna Leibbert, started a movement to carve remaining tree stumps into eclectic sculptures, like birds, angels and even a dalmatian.)

The Alamo, arguably the most famous structure in Texas, owes part of its very existence to the strong-headedness of Adina Emilia De Zavala. The granddaughter of Lorenzo De Zavala, the first Vice President of the Republic of Texas, founded “De Zavala’s Daughters,” a preservationist group. As with all things related to the Alamo, the exact history of how the structure was saved from demolition is convoluted and fraught. The short of it is, De Zavala and a network of like-minded women secured funding to purchase the long barracks in 1903. Later, when the barracks was at risk of being razed, De Zavala barricaded herself inside for three days to protest its destruction, a standoff that made the national news.

Women haven’t just focused on restoring Texas; they built the state they wanted to see. Mabel Welch, El Paso’s first female architect and the second-ever registered female architect in Texas, popularized Spanish-style architecture in the city, a style well-suited to the arid climate both in function and form. Azellia White started the Sky Ranch Flying Service in Houston, an airport that served its Black population, with her husband and two other Tuskegee Airmen. (Fun fact: Bessie Coleman, from Atlanta, Texas, was the first civilian licensed Black pilot in the world.) Jovita González de Mireles wrote textbooks in Spanish and began the first bilingual program for elementary schools in Texas.

All of these women were the energy and the lifeblood of what makes Texas what it is today. They serve as an inspiration for something I am part of building—and restoring—today.

•••

In early 2020, I joined the founding team of The 19th, a national media organization reporting on the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Early on, it was decided that we would be based in Austin. To some, it seemed an odd choice. After all, isn’t the center of American politics in Washington, DC? Isn’t the center of media in New York? Isn’t the birthplace of American democracy in Philadelphia? Why choose Texas, a place so far from these hubs?

We chose Austin because Texas is, in fact, emblematic of some of the issues we have seen plaguing gender and politics today. There are only 45 women in the Texas state legislature, representing just 25 percent of the total seats. Only nine women have ever been elected to state executive office, and only one since 2013. The state only has six women in Congress. Kay Bailey Hutchison remains the only woman Texas has sent to the US Senate, from 1993 to 2013.

The state is also emblematic of some of the issues plaguing media and gender. The top editors of the newspapers serving the six major metros—Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio—are all men.

But the tide is turning. In the 2020 elections, at least half of the people on the ballot for congressional office in Texas were women. In 2018, “the year of the woman,” Sylvia Garcia, of Houston, and Veronica Escobar, of El Paso, won their Congressional races, becoming the first Latinas Texas elected as US Representatives. That same year, 17 Black women won their races to be judges in Harris County, where Houston is located, contributing a monumental victory to the “Black Girl Magic” movement. Lina Hidalgo also made history, becoming the first Latina and first woman to be elected Harris County judge, a position likened to being the “CEO” of the state’s most populous county. In 2016, more women than men in Texas voted in the general election.

Building something here to redress an imbalance in the media coverage of an already imbalanced representation in national politics feels brassy and brash. And on the days it feels hard, or even impossible, I’ll walk up to the Capitol building—blood pumping through my cardiovascular system—and invoke the words of Ninfa Laurenzo, who built an eponymous restaurant empire out of a single taqueria in my native city of Houston: “There is an attitude in Texas that makes you feel you can do anything you want to do. I admire so many women who have come out of Texas and done well. I like the image Texas brings to mind—that of bigness, of strength, of goodness.”