Jane Y. McCallum

From Suffragist to Secretary of State 

Austinite Jane Y. McCallum (1878-1957) was one of the leading suffragists in Texas whose leadership skills combined with her persuasive writing made for a keen President of the Austin Woman Suffrage Association, as well as publicist for the suffrage movement in Texas. McCallum was also an influential statewide campaigner and lobbyist with the Texas legislature to secure women’s voting rights.

While working on the suffrage movement and as a young mother of five, McCallum was one of the first women with children to attend the University of Texas as well as the first married women to join a UT sorority (Alpha Delta Pi), and to lend herself to another meaningful project, raising $700,000 to support US troops in World War I.

After the 19th Amendment was passed, McCallum continued to participate in state and national politics, serving on Austin’s first City Planning Commission as well as the first woman commissioner of a Travis County grand jury.  Along with the Texas League of Women Voters, she fought for education, health care, and child labor laws, and was executive secretary of the Women's Joint Legislative Council, a powerful group sometimes known as the "Petticoat Lobby. Most notable, McCallum served as the longest-serving Secretary of State in Texas (1927-1933) and continued to lobby for laws relating to child labor, education, and prison reform throughout her life.

After the 19th Amendment was ratified, McCallum’s suffrage column in the Austin American Statesman became “Woman and Her Ways” and appeared until the 1940s. She authored a book detailing the history of the suffrage movement as well penned a profile of international sculptor and Austin suffragist Elisabet Ney. In 1929, McCallum published “Women Pioneers” a compilation of fourteen American leaders, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Dorthea Dix, Eliza Lucas Pickney, and Anne Hutchinson. 

Governor Dan Moody appointed McCallum as Texas Secretary of State in 1927, which she held through Moody’s successor Governor Ross Sterling.  McCallum is the only Texas Secretary of State to have served two terms under two Governors.

McCallum played a huge role in Texas’ fight for women’s suffrage and left an immense footprint as a wife, mother, lobbyist, activist, journalist, publicist, Democratic Party advocate, and Secretary of State. 

In all that McCallum achieved in her life, and with all her “firsts”, she said discovering and properly restoring an original copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence was one of her most fulfilling accomplishments in her public life.