HORTENSE SPARKS WARD (1872–1944)
In 1910, Hortense Sparks Ward became the first woman admitted to the
Texas state bar. Fifteen years later, Ward was one of three lawyers who
became the first women to serve on the Texas Supreme Court, albeit
briefly.
Born in Matagorda County in 1872, Ward was 11 when she moved with her
family to Edna, where her father was a deputy sheriff. After attending
Nazareth Academy in Victoria, Ward returned to Edna, where she began
teaching in 1890. Ward married Albert Malsch and had three daughters
with him. The family later moved to Houston. In 1906, the 34-year-old
Ward divorced Malsch and supported her daughters by working as a court
stenographer.
The law captured Ward’s interest. She studied law through
correspondence courses while working in the law office of William Henry
Ward, who became her second husband. After successfully passing the
Texas bar exam, with the second highest score of 94.7, Ward began
practicing with her husband. The couple formed the firm of Ward &
Ward. Some biographical reports indicate Ward did not appear in court,
because she feared that having a female lawyer involved in a case might
prejudice all-male juries. But in 1915, she represented the plaintiffs
in an insurance case, James W. Lawson, et al. v. Supreme Lodge of
the United Brotherhood of America, heard in the 17th District Court
in Fort Worth. Ward won the case. Also in 1915, she became the first
Texas woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Throughout her career, Ward championed the rights of women. In 1913,
she led a successful effort to persuade the Texas Legislature to pass
the Married Woman’s Property Rights Law, which gave married women
partial control over their separate property and community property.
Ward also played a key role in the women’s suffrage movement.
In 1918, Ward became president of the Houston Equal Suffrage Association
and lobbied Governor W.P. Hobby and the Legislature to ratify the
Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the right to vote and for a bill
allowing women to vote in primary elections. Ward drafted the primary
suffrage bill, which the Legislature passed in 1918. In the following
year, Texas became the ninth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.
On June 27, 1918, Ward became the first woman to register to vote in
Harris County and, within 27 days, she had persuaded about 386,000
women to register to vote. She wrote newspaper articles on women’s
suffrage and a pamphlet titled Instructions for Women
Voters.
Winning the vote for women did not help Hortense Ward in 1920, when
she was the first woman to run for judicial office in Texas. Ward ran
for Harris County judge on the slogan: “Don’t vote for me
because I am a woman but don’t vote against me because I am a
woman.” She lost the race. But in August 1923, the Houston City
Council appointed Ward as temporary judge of the city’s
corporation court while the presiding judge was on vacation. Ward, the
first woman in Texas to hold a judicial position, served six days on
that court, handing out fines for traffic law violations and
drunkenness.
In January 1925, Governor Pat Neff appointed Ward and two other women
to the state Supreme Court to hear Johnson v. Darr. The case
involved a dispute over a trust and title to two tracts of land in El
Paso. The land was claimed by Woodmen of the World, a fraternal
organization that sold insurance to men who became its members. Almost
every male lawyer in Texas was a WOW member. The only three justices on
the state’s high court at the time were disqualified from
considering Johnson, and Neff opted to appoint women to
temporarily serve on the court. Of the three women Neff originally
appointed, Ward was the only woman who had the seven years of legal
experience required for service on the Supreme Court. Neff subsequently
appointed Hattie Leah Herenberg and Ruth Brazzil and designated Ward as
the chief justice.
Before making the appointments, Neff had contacted H.L. Clamp, the
Supreme Court’s clerk, regarding the qualifications for serving
on the court. As the story goes, Clamp jokingly told Neff that women
could be qualified to serve on the court if the governor could find
three women who could agree on anything. The three women Neff appointed
agreed on the case in the end, affirming a court of appeals judgment in
favor of the Woodmen.
It would be 57 years before another woman served on the state’s
Supreme Court. In 1982, Governor William P. Clements appointed Ruby
Kless Sondock to fill the unexpired term of Justice James G. Denton, who
had died.
Ward did not live to see another woman serve on the state’s
highest civil court. She died in 1944.
