Jane Y. McCallum

Jane Yelvington McCallum (December 30, 1877 – August 14, 1957) was an American politician and author, a women's suffrage and Prohibition activist, and the longest-serving Secretary of State of Texas. She attended schools in Wilson County, Texas, for the most part, and studied at the University of Texas at Austin for several years. As a suffragist, she published many columns in local newspapers in support of that cause and others. She was a member of numerous organizations. In 1927, she campaigned for Dan Moody and would be appointed as the Secretary of State after his successful election as governor. After leaving the position in 1933, she remained active in writing, activism, and political and civic affairs until she died in 1957.

Early life Jane Yelvington was born December 30, 1877, in La Vernia, Texas. Her father, Alvaro Leonard Yelvington, was a county pioneer sheriff, and her mother was Mary Fullerton LeGette. Throughout her childhood, she attended county schools but also briefly attended a college in Mississippi from 1892 to 1893. She attended the University of Texas at Austin for several years as one of the first mothers to attend the university, and became the first married woman to join a sorority on that campus. Despite opposition, she gave speeches and wrote newspaper articles in support of women's right to vote while raising five children. The protest was timed to reach many of his supporters in town for a farming conference and contributed to a turn in the general opinion of Ferguson and his eventual resignation. After 1920, when women were able to vote, she became active in the Texas League of Women Voters. For the Texas amendment on primaries, she served as the state publicity and press manager, and for the Nineteenth Amendment, she served as the state chairman of its ratification committee. Throughout the 1920s, they pushed for legislation on "school funding, prison reform, maternal/infant health care, restrictions on child labor, stricter prohibition laws," most of which was enacted.

Texas Secretary of State In 1926, McCallum campaigned for then-attorney general Dan Moody's run for state governor, hosting the campaign headquarters in her own home. She and her colleagues hired a secretary, and they sent "letters, editorials, and pamphlets" to Texas women asking them to vote for Moody, who would later win the election against incumbent Miriam A. Ferguson, wife of former governor James E. Ferguson who had been attempting to win back control of the office under his wife's name. As in her earlier activism, she supported legislation on Prohibition, prison reform, and child labor, and she published a pamphlet criticizing former Governor Miriam A. Ferguson's numerous pardons of prisoners.

Later activism Throughout her life, McCallum remained involved in politics and civic matters, giving speeches and making public and radio appearances. She continued to publish her column, now called "Woman and Her Ways", in the Austin American-Statesman until the late 1940s. During the 1940 presidential election, she served as an elector; in 1942 and 1944, she served as a state Democratic committeewoman, first for the Twentieth Senatorial District and then for the Tenth United States Congressional District. She was appointed to Austin's first city planning commission that same year, and the following January, in 1945, she protested with and led the Women's Committee on Educational Freedom to the state capitol, protesting the firing of her alma mater's president Homer Rainey after his opposition to the dismissal of faculty accused of being communists. Her diaries were later purchased by the University of Texas at Austin in 1990.

Publications