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September 2008
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Emily Austin
by Dara McCoy
A Frontier Woman for Modern Times
 Stephen
F. Austin wasn’t the only pioneering spirit in the renowned
Austin family. While Stephen led groups of settlers to
tame the wilds of the Texas frontier, his sister Emily Austin
blazed her own path through a male-dominated era few women of
her time dared. Her story will be detailed in a new
biography in 2009 by Light Cummins, Austin College
professor of history. This groundbreaking story reveals that
the intertwining storylines of Texas’ birth and the Austin
family run much deeper than Moses and Stephen F. Austin.
Stephen F. Austin was named the
“Father of Texas” at his funeral by Texas history icon Sam
Houston and was a significant leader during the Texas
Revolution and its early years as a republic. Monuments to
Austin include the namesakes of the Texas state capital and
two Texas higher educational institutions, as well as a
60-foot statue in Angleton, Texas. His likeness is on Austin
College’s official seal. Yet, obscured by the enormous shadow
cast by one of Texas’ most prominent historical figures and
by the legal and societal restraints on women of the
1800s, stands Emily Austin.
Cummins is one of the first
historians to sort through Emily Austin’s personal papers,
while researching and writing the first biography of her
life. His research unveils a depth of character in Emily
Austin, sole heir to her famous brother Stephen F. Austin
and his Texas land holdings after his death in 1836. The
biography details the political, business, and social life of
this unique frontier woman, who defied 1800s-era societal
norms for women and put her own stamp on history.
After Stephen’s death, it was
Emily Austin who wielded and magnified the considerable
economic and political influence of the Austin family
heritage and estate. Despite Stephen’s likeness on Austin
College’s official seal, it was Emily Austin who made the donation
to provide a financial foundation on which Austin College was built.
It was Emily Austin, through active involvement in Texas economic
and social development, who ensured that the Austin family influence
on Texas history did not die with Stephen.
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Emily Austin shipped this bed
from Missouri to Texas. |
The Life of Emily Austin
Though born in Virginia in 1795,
Emily Austin spent most of her adolescent life in
Missouri, at that time part of the western U.S. frontier,
where her father Moses Austin operated a lead mining
business. Emily received a quality education by
frontier standards at a Lexington, Kentucky, boarding school
for four years and almost two years at the Hermitage
Academy, a prestigious girls’ school near New York City. It
was an education that would serve her well and may have
played a part in her concern for education later in life.
 After her schooling, Emily
returned to Missouri and married a young merchant, James
Bryan, who eventually joined her father in the mining
business. But a series of events starting in 1819 would
thrust Emily Austin into a role that defined the independent
woman who would eventually settle in Texas. The Panic of
1819, a depression after the War of 1812, left the Austin
family in financial ruin. In 1821, Moses Austin died after
obtaining a grant to bring 300 colonists to Texas.
Finishing what his father started was the beginning of
Stephen F. Austin’s story in Texas.
Emily Austin’s story took a
different turn. One year after her father’s death, James Bryan died,
leaving Emily a young widow solely responsible for four children and
her aged mother. With the family wealth decimated and Stephen
committed to the colonization of Texas, Emily’s frontier became
providing for her family, a difficult and socially unseemly prospect
for a single woman in the 1800s. “In that social construct, southern
men tended to view women of their class as delicate, submissive
helpmates,” writes Cummins. “Women from Emily Austin’s social class
in the South related to the world through the framework provided by
the men in their lives.”
By 1822, that social construct
had failed Emily and no man with the ability to provide support
remained in her family. “All of the Austins were strong-willed
people,” Cummins said. “She was no less strong-willed than Moses or
Stephen F. Austin, and her years of widowhood created a circumstance
where she could no longer worry about acceptability.” Survival
became Emily’s focus, and by that necessity, self-reliance was born.
She took in sewing from neighborhood men, opened a small school and
charged a modest tuition, and put others in her household to work on
various crafts, like bonnets, to sell.
Eventually, Emily remarried, to
James Franklin Perry, and at Stephen’s beckoning, they moved to
Texas in 1831 and established Peach Point Plantation, the place that
Stephen also came to call home. Cummins is convinced the “period of
constant hardship and material depravation as the sole breadwinner
for her mother and her children” created the Emily Austin who would
later be unafraid to manage actively the Austin estate.
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Real Estate, Railroads, and Politics
When Stephen F. Austin died in
1836, he left his entire estate not in James Perry’s name, nor in
the names of Emily’s sons, but directly to Emily Austin. “As the
sole surviving heir of Moses and Stephen F. Austin, Emily had become
one of the largest individual land holders in Texas and indisputably
its richest woman,” Cummins writes. While Texas law didn’t allow
married women to enter into contracts in their own name, separate
from their husbands, it did allow them to retain personal ownership
of land inherited individually, noted Cummins.
Emily’s management and
enhancement of this inheritance and the Austin family political and
social prominence elevated her as a woman ahead of her time. Though
legal restrictions on women concerning business and contractual
transactions often meant Emily had to act through the signatures of
her husband or sons when they were grown, Cummins said the letters
and records Emily kept revealed her to be very involved in the
management of the Austin estate.
Emily was active in urban
planning and in selling land — often doing so personally as a real
estate agent of sorts — to raise capital and disposable income. She
was an investor in the first attempt to build a railroad in Texas.
Her son Moses Austin Bryan was the secretary of the first railroad
company in Texas, but Emily was the chief stockholder, Cummins
explained. Emily even loaned money to Gail Borden to purchase his
first herd of dairy cows. “We all know what he did,” Cummins added.
Throughout Stephen’s life as a
political leader, Emily entertained guests and organized parties for
her unmarried brother. Later, when her son Guy M. Bryan entered
politics, Emily retained the role of hostess, seemingly unabashed
about sharing her views when the opportunity presented itself,
Cummins said. At one point, Emily hosted eventual U.S. president
Rutherford B. Hayes, a close friend of Guy Bryan’s, at Peach Point
plantation.
Emily also utilized the Austin
family wealth and fame in social development through philanthropy.
She was instrumental in founding the first Episcopal church in Texas
— a denomination she had been a part of prior to marrying Perry —
and recruiting its first bishop, Leonidas Polk, who became a famous
Civil War general and has the military base of Fort Polk, Louisiana,
named after him. She also brought one of the earliest educators to
Texas in Thomas J. Pilgrim to teach her own children. Pilgrim
founded the first school in Texas with Emily’s support, according to
Cummins.
In 1840, Reverend Daniel Baker
traveled to Peach Point Plantation, having just left the founding
meeting of the Presbytery of Brazos. The idea to found a
Presbyterian college in Texas had formed out of that meeting, and
Baker had been told to visit Emily Austin about funding. Baker’s
visit was successful, as Emily and her husband, James Perry, were
devout members of the Presbyterian Church and agreed to support the
college. In 1849, Baker renewed his efforts to found the college and
Emily honored her earlier pledge by deeding acreage in Brazoria
County and all the Austin family’s claims to pension funds or monies
due to Stephen from the State of Texas to the college. It was this
gift that made possible the founding of Austin College, one of the
earliest colleges in Texas.
Concern for her family was a
driving factor in Emily’s life, evidenced by the years she alone
supported her family in poverty and by her activity to preserve and
grow her inheritance for the future provision of her children. “When
she died in 1851, she passed on to her living children the entire
Stephen F. Austin estate, which was greatly augmented in size,” said
Cummins. In fact, Emily’s Last Will and Testament valued her estate
at $450,000 in 1851 U.S. dollars, which would roughly equal $12
million in purchasing power by today’s terms, according to Cummins’
calculations.
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Emily Austin's Texas?
To diminish Stephen F. Austin’s role in the
birth of Texas would be preposterous, but to downplay or ignore
the woman who helped raise this “child” diminishes the full
legacy of the Austin family. Stephen’s place in Texas history is
cemented, but Emily’s equally important role is just beginning
to be revealed and understood through efforts like Cummins’
biography.
“Emily Austin was very much her own woman,
with strong and well-articulated personal feelings centered on a
steely personality bolstered by a rock-solid resolve for action
that would enable her to survive through almost six decades of
frontier hardship,” writes Cummins. “She was in many ways a very
modern woman. As the daughter of Moses Austin and sole heir of
her brother Stephen F. Austin, she had political, economic, and
social status in Texas, which made her absolutely unique and
unprecedented.”
In the 1800s, the fortitude required for a
single woman to care for five dependents with no male assistance
and later be a guiding hand in the maturation of Texas was no
less impressive than the fortitude Stephen displayed in settling
the Texas frontier. By shedding light on these lesser known
chapters, the story of Texas, the Austin family, and women’s
history gains new breadth and depth.
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Significant Moments in Women’s Rights
1848
The first women’s rights convention is held in
Seneca Falls, New York,
resulting in a call for equal
treatment under the law and voting rights for women.
1869
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form
the National Woman
Suffrage Association, seeking women’s
right to vote.
1893
Colorado is the first state to grant women the
right to vote.
1919
The federal woman suffrage amendment, originally
written by Susan B. Anthony
and introduced in 1878, is passed by
the House and Senate.
1920
The 19th Amendment to the Constitution grants
women the right to vote.
1960
The Food and Drug Administration approves birth
control pills.
1961
President John Kennedy establishes the
President’s Commission on the Status
of Women and appoints Eleanor
Roosevelt as chairwoman.
1963
Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.
The book becomes a best-seller
and galvanizes the modern women’s
rights movement.
1963
Congress passes the Equal Pay Act.
1966
The National Organization for Women is founded
with the aim to end sexual
discrimination by means of
legislative lobbying, litigation, and civil disobedience.
1971
Ms. Magazine is first published, selling
300,000 copies in 8 days; editor Gloria
Steinem is launched as an icon of the
modern feminist movement.
1972
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is passed by
Congress. Originally drafted in 1923,
the amendment died in 1982 when it
failed to achieve ratification by a minimum of 38 states.
1972
The Supreme Court rules that the right to privacy
includes an unmarried
person’s right to use contraceptives.
1972
Title IX of the Education Amendment bans sex
discrimination in schools;
participation of women in athletics
and professional schools increases dramatically.
1973
The Supreme Court establishes a woman’s right to
a safe and legal abortion.
1996
The Supreme Court rules that the all-male
Virginia Military School has to admit women in
order to continue to receive public
funding. It holds that creating a separate, all-female school
will not suffice.
Excerpted
from “Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.: Timeline.”
Infoplease. © 2000-2007 Pearson Education, publishing as
Infoplease
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Becky Russell Sykes
"Kiki" Moore McLean
Virginia Smith Volpe
September 2008
Feedback? |
From Emily Austin to Austin College Women of Today
Equality for women has come a
long way since the days of Emily Austin, but some successful Austin
College alumnae understand that it hasn’t been too long ago that
women were pressing for more individual rights — and that today’s
women encounter new and different challenges.
Becky Russell Sykes ’67,
executive director of the Dallas Women’s Foundation, remembers a
time when expectations for women were very different than those for
college-aged women today. “I grew up in the ’50s and by the time I
got to Austin College, the prevailing thought was that girls would
marry and have a family, and that was it,” she said. “We really
didn’t have any role models for professional women.”
Sykes followed the plan pretty
well — marrying and taking a teaching position for a few years
before leaving the workforce to start a family — until an economic
depression hit Texas in the mid-1980s. “I had to go back to work,”
Sykes said. “I was 41 or so when this happened, and this was a great
shock to my system.”
So, Sykes returned to the
workforce as an administrative assistant to the man who bought
Greyhound Lines and relocated the company to Dallas. The company’s
violent 1990 drivers strike and Chapter 11 bankruptcy gave Sykes a
tough return to the work world. “It was some of the best experience
I could have had because I was such a bleeding heart, and I
toughened up working in this corporation,” Sykes said.
Sykes later worked for a TV
station, as a development director for Southern Methodist
University’s Meadows School of the Arts, and as a non-profit
consultant before being contacted by an organization that she had
helped start 15 years before. Sykes had served as the first board
president of the Dallas Women’s Foundation when the organization got
its start, addressing inequality of funding between female-focused
agencies and male-serving groups like YMCA and Boy Scouts of
America. “At that time, less than four percent of annual foundation
dollars across the nation were going to programs specifically for
women and girls,” she said.
Sykes was asked to serve as the
interim executive director and in 1998 was hired to fill the role.
She said the Dallas Women’s Foundation is a place for women to learn
about philanthropy and to provide a source of funding for the
community’s girls and women, who often face unique issues like the
scary prospect Emily Austin faced in caring for her children and
elderly mother.
Sykes, who deals with women’s
philanthropy on a daily basis, firmly believes that women, like
Emily Austin, have been a driving force in development and progress
not only for women’s issues but also for a much broader spectrum of
issues. “Individual women from the early days of this country have
been building America through their volunteer work and through
philanthropy for social change,” Sykes said. “Women were using their
wealth to open doors, and it always had to do with elevating people
and lifting people out of their circumstances or giving them
opportunities.”
Catherine “Kiki” Moore McLean
’85, who had a front row seat to an important moment in women’s
history this year as a senior campaign adviser for Senator Hillary
Clinton, agrees. “One thing women have always been good about doing
is finding a way to move themselves forward, even in the era of
Emily Austin, who couldn’t work the front channels, but worked the
back channels,” she said. (See The
Race for Madam President)
Virginia Smith Volpe ’90,
director for Global Transaction Services at Citi, is part of a
generation of women that has had the benefit of women role models.
“I am very thankful for the generation before me because they fought
tooth and nail, and now I don’t have to,” she said. “You still don’t
see women in all positions. It’s a work in progress, but advancement
based on merit is happening.”
However, she sees the progress
of generations before her and today’s continuing evolution of
women’s rights as slightly different. What Volpe finds
“breathtaking” is that women are taking success into their own hands
and going beyond “glass-ceiling” terminology. “The generation before
me defined success by giving up anything necessary to get to the
top,” Volpe said. “What I am seeing now, in my generation and
beyond, is the ability of women to define success on their own
terms. That can mean a combination of marriage, partners, kids,
friends, life outside of work, and career.”
Sykes and McLean hope that
younger women don’t lose sight of the progress made. “Equality is
still an issue and always will be until we have economic parity,”
McLean said. “I think we have some generational challenges for women
who are growing up not knowing some of the restrictions women ahead
of them experienced.”
Sykes, who as a married woman
couldn’t own property in her own name by Texas law until the Marital
Property Act of 1967, recognizes that the landscape for women has
changed dramatically during her lifetime, but hopes the stories of
the women who pushed for those changes aren’t forgotten. “Young
women and girls need to hear these very inspiring stories about
Emily Austin and other women in history,” Sykes said. “When I came
along, there was no such thing as women’s history. The great
advantage that younger women have now is role models.”
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