Minnie Fisher Cunningham was Texas's most important female political activist. After directing Texas's womans suffrage campaign, she helped establish the National League of Women Voters and the Woman's National Democratic Club. After an unsuccessful attempt to gain election to the US Senate, Cunningham evolved into a left feminist, increasingly aware that women could be oppressed by class and race as well as by gender. A leader of the post-1945 Texas liberal movement, she inspired a generation of young women, including Liz Carpenter and Billie Carr. This is the first biography of the lifelong politician affectionately known as Minnie Fish.
Judith McArthur and Harold Smith are both professors of history at the University of Houston, Victoria
An important and timely book that not only advances understanding of twentieth-century Texas political history, an understudied period, but also speaks to significant debates about women's political endeavors in the years between suffrage and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Cunningham's life story demonstrates that feminist activism did not disappear so much as it assumed alternative forms.