Born in La Vernia, Texas. She received education in county schools, and at 15 years old, she attended Dr. Zealey’s Female College in Mississippi. At age 18, she married Arthur McCallum, and the couple settled in Austin, where he served as a school superintendent. Her first steps into politics were campaigning for woman suffrage and prohibition. She convinced the owner of the newspaper “The Austin American” to publish a regular column in which she wrote editorials against the women’s rights movement’s opposition. At the age of 35, she attended the University of Texas at Austin and became one of the first mothers to study at the university. She dropped out after three years and registered again a few years later, but never completing her degree. In 1915, she was chosen as president of the Austin Women Suffrage Association. Together with Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, she led a statewide campaign for the women’s suffrage movement, giving speeches and publishing articles. In 1920, after the ratification of the 19th amendment, McCallum shifted her focus toward other political reforms. She became active in the League of Women Voters in Texas and served as its first vice president. She also served as executive secretary of the Women’s Joint Legislative Council, also known as the “Petticoat Lobby,” promoting legislation of women’s and social issues such as school funding, maternal and child health care, restrictions on child labor, illiteracy, prison reform, and stricter prohibition laws. After supporting Dan Moody’s campaign for state governor, asking women to vote for him, she was appointed the Secretary of State, a position she served for six years. McCallum is the only person in Texas to serve in this position under two governors and for more than one term. While in office, she discovered an original signed copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence and helped restore it. She remained active in politics throughout her life, giving speeches, writing her column, and leading women’s demonstrations. She served as an elector during the 1940 presidential election and as a state Democratic committeewoman during the next two presidential elections. She was appointed as the first city planning commission of Austin and leading women. In 1954, after women won the right to serve on juries, 77 years old, McCallum became the first female commissioner of a Travis County Grand Jury. Read more...

Born as Franzisca Bernadine Wilhelmina Elisabet Ney in Münster, Prussia (today German). As a child, she was assisting her father with his job as a stone carver. After graduating from the local school, she announced that she is moving to Berlin to study sculpture, but her parents refused because a good Catholic girl does not move on her own to Berlin as well as women were not accepted to art schools in Berlin. Eventually, her parents permitted her to study sculpture, but instead of Berlin, the 19 years old, Ney moved to Munich. At first, she studied with a private teacher, and later she was admitted to the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, becoming the first woman to be admitted to the Academy’s School of Sculpture. She graduated with high honors and moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin Academy of Art, where Christian Daniel Rauch was her teacher. Through him, she met many notable and renowned people, who later, after she opened her studio, become her sculptures’ subjects, including the brothers Grimm, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Richard Wagner. Back in Munich, Ney met Edmund Montgomery, a Scottish medical student at the time. They got married, even though she believed that the institution of marriage is a state of bondage for women. She kept her surname, remained outspoken about her view of women’s roles, and often denied she was married. The couple lived for a while in Madeira and Rome before migrating to Thomasville, Georgia, to avoid the Franco-Prussian War and in the hope of establishing a colony of like-minded people in America. Pregnant with her first child, Ney quit sculpturing for nearly 20 years to take care of her family as well as to run the Liendo plantation they bought after moving to Galveston, Texas. In 1890, when she was almost sixty years old, Ney received a commission to sculpture the figures of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin that was supposed to be displayed at the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Fair in Chicago. Although she missed the deadline, the two life-sized statues can be seen today at the Texas State Capitol in Austin and the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol. In 1892 she set Austin as her new home, a house in a Greek temple style with a studio and large wild garden. She named it “Formosa” and it became a cultural gathering center, which made a great impact on the city’s art scene. She continued to sculpt till her last day, on June 29, 1907. She and her husband, who died four years later, are buried in Liendo plantation. Read more...

Barbara Charline Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up on an unpaved street “in the biggest ghetto in the biggest state.” Jordan graduated with a B.A. from Texas Southern University and later received a law degree from Boston University. After two failed attempts at running for the Texas House of Representatives, she won a seat in the 1966 Texas Senate, the first black woman in the position – among 30 white men. In 1972 she was the first black person elected to the National Congress from Texas since the Reconstruction era, after the Civil War. She served only six years due to ill health and spent the rest of her life teaching at the University of Texas in Austin. Barbara Jordan was a great orator, a skill that gained her national recognition when addressing the Judiciary Committee in 1974 on national television – she spoke in praise of the constitution when calling for the impeachment of President Nixon after the Watergate scandal. Her talent for speaking in public made her the first woman and the first black keynote speaker at a Democratic National Convention in 1976. At the same time, her nature as a politician was a pragmatic negotiator, which led to criticism from black and feminist activists. In Jordan’s last public service position, she was appointed Head of the Commission on Immigration Reform, for which she had to travel to Mexico and the Dominican Republic in a wheelchair. She died at the age of 59 from pneumonia. Her death made her the first African American woman buried in the Texas State Cemetery.   Read more...