Texas Woman's University: A Different Kind of Education

On the south end of Denton stands one of the largest universities in the United States primarily for women, and its founding story is a window into the contested politics of women's education in turn-of-the-century Texas.

The institution came into existence in nineteen oh one through an act of the Texas Legislature, the result of years of organized lobbying by the Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, and the Texas Woman's Press Association. Their argument was practical: Texas women deserved a state-supported institution offering them an education as useful and substantive as those available to men, including training for domestic life as well as the liberal and industrial arts.

Fourteen Texas cities competed for the campus. Denton won the contest on February fifth, nineteen oh two, by offering seventy acres of land and a sixteen-thousand-dollar cash bonus. The institution opened as the Girls Industrial College in nineteen oh three, conferring its first degrees in nineteen oh four from a single building that housed every academic program and every student on campus simultaneously.

The college went through several name changes before settling on Texas Woman's University in nineteen fifty-seven. Throughout those decades it evolved far beyond its domestic-arts roots, developing programs in health sciences, nursing, occupational therapy, and the fine and performing arts. Its health sciences campus in Houston became one of the largest in the state.

The university remains one of the largest primarily female-enrolled institutions in the United States, a distinction that was hard-won through decades of advocacy by women who understood that access to higher education was not a courtesy but a civic right. The organization that lobbied for its creation in the eighteen nineties would recognize the place that resulted, even if what women study here today would have astonished them.