Texas Women First
American history is teeming with unconventional, trailblazing Lone Star women with big, unprecedented achievements—outstanding, outrageous, outré women who know all about being “Texas Big” and being first. Texas’s own Bessie Coleman was the first black person in the world to earn a pilot’s license. Students and typists the world over breathed a sigh of relief when San Antonio–born Bette Nesmith Graham released Mistake Out, now known as Liquid Paper®. Way ahead of the curve, University of Texas graduate Aida Nydia Barrera saw the need for bilingual educational programming and in 1970 started Carrascolendas, the first television show of its kind in the country. In 1981, El Paso’s Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice of the United States Supreme Court. Join author Sherrie McLeRoy for an introduction to the exceptional women of Lone Star history.
Author Bio: Sherrie McLeRoy is an independent historical scholar and writer from Aledo, Texas. Her first career, from 1974 to 1988, was as a museum administrator and curator in Virginia and Texas. Since then, she has been a writer, speaker, and historian, and she has written or contributed to more than twenty books on the histories of Texas and her native Virginia.
