On a vacation to Texas a while back, I picked up this slender volume of biographical sketches, Women in Texas, by Anne Fears Crawford and Crystal Sasse Ragsdale.

When I bought the book, I was primarily intrigued by the chapter about Annie Webb Blanton, which the authors described as the foremost woman educator in Texas.

After her graduation from high school in LaGrange, Texas, Annie taught at a one-room county school in Pine Springs.  After the death of her father, Annie moved to Austin and taught in public elementary schools, and later at Austin High School.

While teaching, Annie attended classes at the University of Texas, Austin, earning a degree in English literature in 1899 and her Master’s degree in 1923. She earned a PhD from Cornell University in 1927.

By the time she finished her undergraduate degree, Annie had been teaching for several years in rural schools and schools in the Austin area. She went on to become a professor of English in Denton at the North Texas State Normal College, an institution that trained teachers, from 1901 to 1918. For the next 22 years, she taught at her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. She was only the third woman to hold full professor status at that university.

This amazing teacher, once president of the Texas State Teachers’ Association, was encouraged and financed by the State Suffrage Association in her 1918 bid to become the first woman elected to the state superintendent’s office. Texans gathered in droves across the Lone Star State to hear this remarkable teacher speak, and to witness the novelty of a woman campaigning in Texas’s male-dominated political arena. Apparently, the campaign was a dirty one, with opponents charging that Blanton was divorced (yikes!) and that she was an atheist (yeesh!).

You can read more about what happened in that 1918 election in the book Women in Texas, available on amazon.com.