If she had not have blazed a trail in the legal arena, today's Texan women of substance like Linda L. Addison, Angeline Lindley Bain, or Jan Fox wouldn't have been super lawyers. Yes, it's Hortense Ward, I am referring to, who was recently remembered by the Houston Heights Woman's Club for her extraordinary gift to women in Texas.
One of the first female attorneys in Texas, Hortense Ward's name may not ring a bell of familiarity to many, but as says Bizjournals, the impact of her actions has outlived her memory for many Texans, especially women.
Born in 1872, Ward received her formal education at Nazareth Academy in Victoria. She then returned to Edna to teach and stay with the family. Subsequently, she married, had three kids, studied stenography, and started working for the Wolf Cigar Co. at Houston.
She then joined the law firm of Hogg, Gill & Jones as a public stenographer at the same time when she got divorced from her husband in 1906. Her penchant for acquiring more knowledge didn't end, but continued thereafter, too. Joining correspondence courses, she moved places literally to climb as high as a court reporter in one of the county courts. However, when she remarried in 1909 to William H. Ward, an attorney, it became the turning point of not only her career, but of many of the Texan women attorneys of today.
The legal field of the bygone era was totally male-centric. Women — soft, gentle, emotional — were considered misfits in the male-dominated "hard-charging" professional arena. Hence, 1910 saw entire Texas with only three female attorneys, including Hortense Ward.
She plowed on till she set up her own firm Ward & Ward in 1915. She cleared her bars, too, which saw Wards being admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States. The rest is history.
To her credit is the Hortense Ward Act — a law passed by the Legislature in 1931 —allowing married women in Texas to have control of their own property and earnings. And besides championing the cause of women in various other sectors, she also fought for women's power to vote. "Don't vote for me because I am a woman, but don't vote against me because I am a woman." However, Texans couldn't bring it to themselves to vote for her, and so her bid to the county judiciary in 1920 ended in a defeat. The drought lasted for another 55 years.
Today, each of the 21st century lady, Texan or otherwise, particularly the law students, needs to thank Ward for her solitary stance that successfully shattered an age-old myth and established that the hand that rocks the cradle at home can also lift the gable for justice.
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