The principal orchestrator of the passage of women's suffrage in
Texas, a founder and national officer of the League of Women
Voters, the first woman to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas,
and a candidate for that state's governor, Minnie Fisher Cunningham
was one of the first American women to pursue a career in party
politics. Cunningham's professional life spanned a half century,
thus illuminating our understanding of women in public life between
the Progressive Era and the 1960s feminist movement.
Cunningham entered politics through the suffrage movement and
women's voluntary association work for health and sanitation in
Galveston, Texas. She quickly became one of the most effective
state suffrage leaders, helping to pass the bill in a region where
opposition to women voters was strongest. In Washington, Cunningham
was one of the core group of suffragists who lobbied the Nineteenth
Amendment through Congress and then traveled the country
campaigning for ratification. After women gained the right to vote
across the nation, she helped found the nonpartisan National League
of Women Voters and organized training schools to teach women the
skills of grassroots organizing, creating publicity campaigns, and
lobbying and monitoring legislative bodies. Through the League, she
became acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, who credited one of her
speeches with stimulating her own political activity.
Cunningham then turned to the Democratic Party, serving as an
officer of the Woman's National Democratic Club and the Women's
Division of the Democratic National Committee. In 1928 Cunningham
became a candidate herself, making an unsuccessful bid for the U.S.
Senate. An advocate of New Dealreforms, Cunningham was part of the
movement in the 1930s to transform the Democratic Party into the
women's party, and in 1944 she ran for governor on a pro-New Deal
platform.
Cunningham's upbringing in rural Texas made her particularly aware
of the political needs of farmers, women, union labor, and
minorities, and she fought gender, class, and racial discrimination
within a conservative power structure. In the postwar years, she
was called the "very heart and soul of Texas liberalism" as she
helped build an electoral coalition of women, minorities, and male
reformers that could sustain liberal politics in the state and
bring to office candidates including Ralph Yarborough and Bob
Eckhardt.
A leader and role model for the post-suffrage generation,
Cunningham was not satisfied with simply achieving the vote, but
agitated throughout her career to use it to better the lives of
others. Her legacy has been carried on by the many women to whom
she taught successful grassroots strategies for political
organizing.
Minnie Fisher Cunningham was the winner of the Liz Carpenter Award
of the Texas State Historical Association, and the T. R. Fehrenbach
Book Award of the Texas Historical Commission.
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