TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

measure on their behalf. TSLAC preserved these records as the memorial and petitions to the legislature series.In one example, the American Women Suffrage Association sent a memorial to both Texas legislative chambersfollowing its annual meeting on November 22, 1871 in Philadelphia. Meeting organizers sent a memorial to allstates, including Texas, petitioning legislators to create and pass a law that would “abolish all political distinctionson account [of] gender.” 32Additionally, the memorials and petitions series illustrates how women attempted to break social barrierson an individual level. Examples in this series showed that women attempted to gain individual rights to own land,control businesses, or divorce husbands. The memorials and petitions series illustrates ways individual womencould navigate the political landscape to acquire some of the freedoms they sought.The Archives’ Judicial Records Reflect the Struggle for Female Enfranchisement in the Courts.The extension of voting rights to women under the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutionand under the Texas Constitution did not bring full equality to women under the law. 33 The records of casesand administrative actions by Texas’s intermediate courts of appeals, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, andthe Texas Supreme Court illustrate the judicial branch’s role in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement ofwomen’s rights. These courts heard cases determining what rights women had under the law as well as the legalityof legislation granting women more rights. Records of these courts also illustrate different interpretations of therights of women.In the years immediately after women gained the right to vote in Texas, the Texas Court of CriminalAppeals and Texas Supreme Court heard cases clarifying the rights of women. As shown in TSLAC’s judicialrecords, these two courts came to differing conclusions. In Harper v. State, the Texas Court of Criminal Appealswas asked to decide if having women on a jury would make a previous indictment void. The Court held that theenfranchisement of women did not extend to the ability to serve on grand or petit juries and the lower court’sdecision was reversed. 34 Only men served on juries until November 2, 1954, when voters approved a Texasconstitutional amendment permitting women jurors.In the 1924 case Dickson v. Strickland, the Texas Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion byholding that women could serve as governor. 35 The Court ruled that the legislature used the male pronoun asthe default term. The Court also noted that “the truths of current history” included the eligibility of women torun for and hold office as a result of a woman’s new right to cast a ballot. 36 These two decisions show that theenfranchisement of women extended to some rights but not to others.More can be discovered about these cases, as well as other court actions, through TSLAC’s holdings.Judicial records vary from case to case, but may include case files, applications, dockets, minutes, proceedingsfrom the lower courts, and opinions. These records are typically arranged by case number. If a researcher doesnot know the case number, then the indexes or dockets for the appropriate court can be used to discover thisidentification. For example, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/50022/32Memorial to the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Texas, February 14, 1872, Texas Memorials and Petitions.Archives and Info. Servs. Div., TSLAC.33A. Elizabeth Taylor, “Woman Suffrage,” Handbook of Texas Online, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/viw01,accessed June 30, 2015.34234 S.W. 909 (Tex. Crim. App. 1921).35114 Tex. 176 (1924).36See also James L. Haley, A Narrative History, 1836-1986, 167 and 282 n.20.71