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Zusatztext "From suffragist to Left Feminist, Minnie Fisher Cunningham has been hailed by her contemporaries as 'the South's best female political organizer' and by >Texas Monthly as the 'Agitator of the Century.' This important book reveals that she was an extraordinary Texan, whose talent for politics led to two campaigns for office and took her from the New Deal to the New Frontier. Minnie Fish, as FDR called her, worked steadfastly to improve the lot of women and of African Americans despite southern proscriptions against them. Readers will rejoice in this well-crafted biography which provides the only current account of a southern state suffrage president and her political afterlife."-Elizabeth Hayes Turner, University of North Texas Informationen zum Autor Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith teach at the University of Houston-Victoria. McArthur is the author of Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas and Smith is the author of The British Women's Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928. Klappentext 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 Americanwomen 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 WomenVoters 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 ownpolitical 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 advocateof 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 poli Zusammenfassung Minnie Fisher Cunningham was Texas's most important female political activist. After directing Texas's woman suffrage campaign, she helped found the National League of Women Voters and the Woman's National Democratic Club. This is the first biography of the lifelong politician affectionately known as Minnis Fish....
