Hidden Tour: Jessie Daniel Ames

Jessie: our Hometown shero

We’re starting today at a place where Jessie Daniel Ames made sure Georgetown got better for women AND men AND children. It’s here where Jessie brainstormed and carried out campaigns that improved conditions for Texans statewide, even as she and other women were belittled as ‘the petticoat lobby” by lawmakers at the Texas Capitol. Here was the homebase where Jessie led the local and state Texas League of Women Voters, and helped it grow into its current powerhouse of voter advocacy chapters across the US—including Wilco’s thriving chapter. And it’s here where Jessie’s influence spread nationally as her passion for racial justice led to founding the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

And it’s here that she left every workday morning with her mother Laura to walk a few blocks to 824 Austin Avenue to their jobs running the Georgetown Telephone Exchange. Their business kept 600 telephones in Georgetown and over 2,000 more in rural Wilco ring-a-ding-dinging.

Feature 3

Here are ladies at work in a spot that was likely similar to the Georgetown Telephone Exchange—in this photo women are connecting Lockhart telephone customers around 1920. Jessie worked to get better wages for her operators and others in the rapidly growing phone industry.

 It is Jessie and Laura’s contribution to Georgetown’s economy and position as businesswomen that jolted Jessie’s motivation to work for women’s suffrage. She wrote: “All I wanted was the vote . . . for I was …the owner of property which voters could tax without the consent of the owners.”

 And Jessie already had a sharpened sense of social justice honed in her girlhood years. Let’s find out about Jessie’s girlhood—we’ll go over to Palestine and Overton in east Texas, where Jessie spent the first nine years of her life.