Women

Antoinette Elizabeth Taylor, historian, was the first scholar to study woman suffrage in the South. Born on June 10, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, she received a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1938 and an M.A. from the University…

In 1905 the Southern Baptist Convention authorized the establishment of a college for women to be located in Murfreesboro and to be known as Tennessee College for Women. The institution was founded on the principle of offering the very best…

On April 5, 1972, the same day that the state Senate ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, the Tennessee General Assembly created the Tennessee Commission on the Status of Women (TCSW). It was to study and highlight women's issues and to…

In 1926 delegates and representatives from seventeen of the state's thirty-four garden clubs met at the Read House in Chattanooga and organized the Tennessee Federation of Garden Clubs (TFGC). Mrs. E. Y. Chapin of the Garden Club of Signal Mountain…

Organized in 1896, the Tennessee Federation of Women's Clubs was designed to bring together women's clubs from across the state into one organization that would provide communication among its members. A decade after the founding of the first women's clubs…

Chattanooga philanthropist Anne Taylor Jones Thomas was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio. Anne Thomas met her future husband, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, while he was attending law school at the University of Cincinnati. The couple married in 1894 in Chattanooga. She…

Lucille Thornburgh, union organizer and labor newspaper editor, was born in 1908 in Strawberry Plains, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Thornburgh. After graduating from Rhea County High School in Dayton she lived in Denver, then Los Angeles, and…

Isabel Hanson Tipton, physicist, was born in Monroe, Georgia, June 17, 1909. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Georgia in 1929 and graduate degrees with majors in physics and minors in chemistry from the University…

Although she rarely held elective office, Molly Todd played an important role in fashioning public policy in Nashville and Tennessee in the second half of the twentieth century. She mobilized support for reform in areas as diverse as birth control,…

This Memphis company was the first insurance agency in the United States to be owned and managed by women. In 1910 Mary Harry Treadwell and her sister, Georgia Harry, founded the company after the death of Treadwell's husband. At the…

Confederate soldier and spy Loreta Janeta Velazquez was born in Cuba, raised in New Orleans, and lived in Memphis at various times during the Civil War. As a young girl Velazquez developed an admiration for Joan of Arc and expressed…

Jo Walker-Meador, the first executive director of the Country Music Association, was born Josephine Denning in Orlinda. One of ten children, her early ambition was to become a girls' basketball coach. She attended Lambuth College and George Peabody College and…

Last Beloved Woman of the Cherokees, Nancy Ward was born in 1738 at Chota and given the name Nanye-hi, which signified "One who goes about," a name taken from Nunne-hi, the legendary name of the Spirit People of Cherokee mythology.…

Suffragist Katherine Burch Warner was born in Chattanooga, raised in Nashville, and educated at Vassar. The well-traveled Kate learned about politics through her father, John C. Burch, editor and publisher of the Nashville American and secretary of the U.S. Senate.…

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, feminist, and civil rights activist, launched an antilynching campaign in the 1890s that made her one of the most outstanding African American women of the nineteenth century. The eldest of eight children born to James "Jim"…

Kitty Wells, pioneering female country music vocalist, was born Muriel Deason in Nashville on August 30, 1919. She learned to sing and play guitar at an early age and was performing with Johnny Wright and the Harmony Girls by 1936.…

The first woman basketball player inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame (in 1992), Nera White of Macon County has become a legendary figure in the annals of women's basketball. Born in Macon County on November 15, 1935, she…

Chattanooga businesswoman Harriet Whiteside was born May 3, 1824, in Wytheville, Virginia, and educated at the Moravian School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to be a teacher. At the age of nineteen she arrived in Chattanooga to teach music to one…

Songwriter Beth Slater Whitson was born in Goodrich, Hickman County, in 1879. Her parents were John H. Whitson and Anna Slater Whitson; her father was coeditor of the Hickman Pioneer newspaper. Beth Whitson began her extensive songwriting career in Hickman…

Educator, suffragist, and Democratic Party worker Charl Ormond Williams was born in Arlington, Tennessee, the third of six children of Crittenden and Minnie Williams. She graduated from Arlington's "high school on the hill" in 1903 and began teaching at Millington…