Texas Woman's University

Texas Woman's University was founded as a result of lobbying efforts for a state-supported women's college led by the Grange and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, with the support of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs and the Texas Woman's Press Association. Throughout the 1890s these organizations pressed for the establishment of a college where young women could receive a practical education, including training in the domestic skills that they would later need as wives and mothers. Enabling legislation was repeatedly defeated. Not until 1901, when the Democratic party adopted the idea as a platform plank, did the legislature authorize the founding of a college to combine the traditional literary education with instruction in the domestic sciences, child care, and practical nursing. A commission appointed by Governor Joseph D. Sayers selected Denton as the site of the new school in 1902. The institution began classes in 1903 as Girls' Industrial College, with an enrollment of 186 students and a faculty of fourteen. Helen M. Stoddard, Mary Eleanor Brackenridge, and Eliza S. R. Johnson were members of the original board of regents, the first women to sit on the governing board of a Texas university. After 1927 legislative mandate required that four of the nine regents be women. The name of the institution was changed to College of Industrial Arts in 1905, to Texas State College for Women in 1934, and to Texas Woman's University in 1957.

In the initial years of its existence TWU was essentially a junior college for rural and small-town girls seeking vocational training. Since many came from areas without high school facilities, the first two years of the curriculum were preparatory; high school graduates went directly to the junior class. The first dormitory was opened in 1907, and a second classroom building was authorized in 1911. Although inadequate funding for dormitory construction kept enrollment below 2,000 until the end of World War I, the curriculum evolved and expanded. In 1914 President Francis M. Bralley initiated the four-year, college-level curriculum, and the first B.S. degrees were awarded the following year. The State Department of Education recognized the institution as a college of the first class in 1916, and by 1923 the liberal arts curriculum had been expanded sufficiently to qualify the college for membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The institution was accredited by the American Association of University Women in 1925 and was placed on the approved list of the Association of American Universities in 1929. A home extension program was set up in 1911, and that same year the college held its first summer normal school. Texas Woman's University was the first educational institution in the state to offer instruction in home economics; graduates of its teacher-training program formed an overwhelming majority of the state's secondary teachers of home economics. A degree program in home demonstration, established in 1922, was the only one in the Southwest, and by the mid-1930s graduates of the university constituted one-third of the home demonstration personnel in Texas. The university granted its first master's degrees in 1930.