Nancy Baker Jones

This collection by Teresa Palomo Acosta—poet, historian, author, and activist—spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children’s story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that she experienced from her childhood to the present.The plays, set in the Central Texas Blackland Prairies where Acosta was raised, provide a unique Latina vision of memory, identity, and experience and are a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought. The essays focus on Acosta’s literary heroes Jovita GonzÁlez de Mireles, Sara Estela RamÍrez, and Elena Zamora O’Shea, important writers who contributed significantly to Tejana literature and to Texas letters. The children’s story, “Colchas, Colchitas,” is based on Acosta’s most notable poem, “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” which pays homage to her mother and the many women of her generation who employed needles and thread, creating both practical and symbolic artifacts.This collection is a creative and, indeed, essential expansion of boundaries for what we think of as history, offering a unique and compelling look into the lived experiences and interior contemplations of a Texas artist well worth knowing. Readers will increase their understanding of Tejana experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tejanaland promises to become an important addition to the cultural record, informing historical perspectives on the experiences of Tejana women and contributing significantly to the existing body of work from Tejana writers.

The Shimmering Is All There Is: On Nature, God, Science, and More is a collection of essays and poems by the late Heather Catto Kohout. A native of San Antonio, Heather was a disciplined and original thinker and writer. Her education, experience, and temperament-as a loving wife, mother, and daughter; a proud Texan; a teacher and scholar with graduate degrees in English literature and religion; and the founder of a residency program for environmental writers and artists at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country-permeate every word she wrote. She had a unique combination of empathetic imagination, profound spirituality, cosmic sensibility, and an ability to laugh-gently-at her fellow creatures and, especially, herself. Heather Kohout's essays and poems are thoughtful, profound, and generous, shifting constantly between the specific and the universal and carrying throughout a message of stewardship. She was an environmentalist at heart, but her writing explores so much more: nature, art, theology, science, food, and family. She wrote about Mexican teenagers who dress as angels in an attempt to halt drug-related violence; the perils of industrial agriculture; the pleasure of letting the chickens out of their coop in the morning; and the battle to save the Georgetown salamander. Always, she wrote about what it means to try to live an ethical life and to be fully human as a part of, not in opposition to, nature. These essays and poems exemplify the best of Texas womanhood: stubborn independence, fierce conviction, good humor, and instinctive generosity and kindness.

When Nikki R. Van Hightower stepped into the position of Women's Advocate for the City of Houston in 1976, she quickly discovered that she had very little real power. And when the all-male city council cut her salary to $1 a year after she spoke at a women's rights rally, she gained full appreciation for just what she was up against.Nonetheless, before the job was abolished altogether two years later, Van Hightower went on to help orchestrate the enormously successful 1975 US National Women's Conference in Houston as part of the International Woman's Year, to help found the Houston Area Women's Center and establish its rape crisis and shelter programs, and to host a radio show where she publicly discussed issues of gender, race, and human rights.This eye-opening memoir offers a window into the world of Texas history and politics in the 1970s, where sexual harassment was not considered discrimination, where women's shelters did not exist, where no women were elected to city government, where women in the parks department were prohibited from working outdoors, and where women paid to use airport toilets while men did not. That world that may seem distant and slightly unreal today, so all the more reason to read Van Hightower's journey as a feminist. Her story will remind us that while much has been achieved in gender relations and women's rights, there is much that remains to be done.

The Art of the Woman explores the life of GermanbornElisabet Ney, a flamboyant sculptor who transfixed the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and left the court of the half-mad Ludwig of Bavaria SAILING TIMES AT Mfor America to put down new roots in Texas.Born in 1833, Ney gained notoriety in Europe by sculpting the busts of such figures as Ludwig II, Schopenhauer, Garibaldi, and Bismarck. In 1871 she abruptly emigrated to America and becamesomething of a recluse until resuming her sculptingcareer two decades later. In Texas, she was knownfor stormy relationships with officials, patrons,and women’s organizations. Her works includedsculptures of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austinand are exhibited in the state and US capitols as wellas the Smithsonian. Emily Fourmy Cutrer’s biography of Ney makesextensive use of primary sources and was the firstto appraise both Ney’s legend and individual worksof art. Cutrer argues that Ney was an accomplishedsculptor coming out of a neglected Germanneoclassical tradition and that, whatever her failuresand eccentricities, she was an important catalyst tocultural activity in Texas.

Along with bar rooms and bordellos, there has hardly been a more male-focused institution in Texas history than the Texas Legislature. Yet the eighty-six women who have served there have made a mark on the institution through the legislation they have passed, much of which addresses their concerns as citizens who have been inadequately represented by male lawmakers. This first complete record of the women of the Texas Legislature places such well-known figures as Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sissy Farenthold, Barbara Jordan, Irma Rangel, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Susan Combs, and Judith Zaffirini in the context of their times and among the women and men with whom they served. Drawing on years of primary research and interviews, Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten offer concise biographies and profiles of all eighty-six women who have served or currently hold office in the Texas Legislature. The biographies describe the women lawmakers' lives, campaign strategies, and legislative successes and defeats. Four introductory essays provide historical and cultural context for the biographies, which are arranged chronologically to give a sense of the passage of time, of relationships among and between women, and of the issues of their eras.