1918 Celebration of Women's Right to Vote by Mary Jane Everett Killgore, Native of Union Parish Louisiana Submitted by: Shawn Martin Date of Submission: 12/2008 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ ================================================================================== ================================================================================== 1918 Celebration of Women's Right to Vote by Mary Jane Everett Killgore, Native of Union Parish Louisiana From Fort Worth, Texas "Star-Telegraph", issue of 5 May 1918 ================================================================================== ================================================================================== DAWN OF NEW EAR FOR WOMEN OF TEXAS WITH JULY PRIMARY ______________ “WE WILL TAKE VOICE IN GOVERNMENT OF OUR STATE AND WILL DO ALL IN OUR POWER TO BETTER IT,” SAYS MRS. KILLGORE, 81. ______________ A New era is dawning for the women of Texas today. It is era in which she will grapple with the big political questions of the day. It is an era when she will begin to fit the world for her children first before fitting her children for the world. It is the era of woman’s voice in the government of her state.” Thus speaks a woman residing on the South Side. She is 81 years of age, and is a keen, clear thinker. She is Mrs. J. M. Killgore [sic - M.J. Killgore], who makes her home with her niece, Mrs. G. B. Buckley, 2138 South Jennings avenue. She says: “Women will now spend the time heretofore employed in discussing petty subjects, in consideration of the political questions before the people of the state.” Since the question of woman suffrage was first actively taken up and sponsored by pioneer partisans of “votes for women” Mrs. Killgore has been a believer in equal suffrage. She came to this belief after a close study of the question, she says. And if she can get to the polls July 27 she will cast the first vote of her lifetime. “The realization of the right for women to vote in Texas is the greatest step in the state’s history,” Mrs. Killgore said, when telling of how long she had waited for the women of the state to get the vote and why she champions the cause of woman suffrage. “I have wanted the women of Texas to vote for a long time,” she said, “because they will purify the ballot as they do everything else. “I believe that every reading woman in the state will scratch a ticket in the coming primary.” Mrs. Killgore has two great nieces that already have voted. One resides in San Francisco and the other in Little Rock, Ark. There are four of her nieces in Texas who will vote this year. Born March 3, 1837, in Perry county, Alabama, Mrs. Killgore, when a small child, was taken to Louisiana by her parents. She calls herself a native of Louisiana because she was reared in that State. Her father was George Everett, a wealthy planter. At 18 she married Robert B. Taylor, a merchant in Union Parish, Louisiana. He died three years later. Several years later she married T. B. Killgore, and they moved to Galveston, Texas, where Killgore was the junior member of the cotton firm of Brown & Killgore. They later moved to Houston, Dallas and then Fort Worth. Mrs. Killgore has been in Texas since 1871; in Fort Worth for the past fourteen years. Her husband died several years ago. ############################################################# File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/la/union/newspapers/articles/1918women-vote.txt