OXFORD — This week — Aug. 18 to be exact — marks the 100th birthday of the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote.
The anniversary of the amendment coincidentally arrives almost simultaneously with a female — Kamala Harris — being formerly nominated by the Democratic Party to be the nation’s vice president.
So there is naturally a lot of emphasis on women in public life, both past and present, this week.
In reflecting on the past hundred years of women’s suffrage, the USA TODAY Network recently named 10 women from each state and the District of Columbia who have made significant contributions to their states and country
An article said the women who were chosen were selected from a list of nominees who lived between 1920 and 2020 and made significant marks in the arts and literature, business, civil rights, education, entertainment, law, media, nonprofits and philanthropy, politics, science and medicine, or sports.
“We didn't come up with the list on our own,” the article said. “We got input from our communities and ultimately, came up with the list.”
The 10 from Mississippi were: civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Myrlie Evers Williams, Unita Blackwell and Constance Slaughter-Harvey, the first Black woman to receive a law degree from the University of Mississippi; Evelyn Gandy, the first female lieutenant governor in Mississippi; author Eudora Welty; philanthropist Oseola McCarty; opera singer Leontyne Price; conservationist Fannye Cook and Margaret Walker Alexander, poet, author and professor of literature for 30 years at Jackson State University.
I have no issues with those selected, but I question why some were left out. To be fair, it’s impossible to list 10 individuals over a 100-year span who made significant contributions on anything without leaving off someone just as deserving. I can immediately think of three who could have been considered on the above list.
I’m no big admirer of U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s politics, but she is the first — and so far the only — female to represent Mississippi in Congress.
No journalists were included in the USA TODAY list, but females have been prominent in the Mississippi media for years.
Among them were two small-town weekly newspaper editors who received national recognition in the mid-20th century for different reasons.
Mary Dawson Cain of Summit in Pike County and Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington in Holmes County were polar opposites philosophically but similar in several other ways.
Both were attractive, strong-willed women with husbands who, though supportive, avoided the limelight.
Both were born out of state — Cain in Louisiana, Smith in Alabama. Both saw their professional careers in Mississippi flourish for a while but not so much at the end of their careers.
I once described Mary Cain as an enigma. She twice ran for governor — in 1951 and 1955 — when most women wouldn’t consider such things. But a plank in her platform called for “jury duty for women who wish to serve (all women are not yet ready for this).”
An avowed segregationist and opponent of what she called “New Deal Socialism,” she gained national notoriety in 1953 by refusing to pay Social Security taxes. After the Internal Revenue Service padlocked her office, she cut the lock, earning her the nickname “Hacksaw Mary.”
Cain was a darling of right-wing conservatives, although she ran for office as a Mississippi Democrat, which was the norm in her day.
She never came close to winning the governor’s race, and once observed that “every four years, Mississippians take an IQ test and fail.”
It’s more surprising that Hazel Brannon Smith was left off the USA TODAY list, which seemed to tilt toward civil rights and social justice, than Cain being omitted.
Smith was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, largely for her commentary on the civil rights movement. She received other awards for her work as a publisher and editor who, among other things, took on the sheriff of her county for shooting a black man.
Her stand for racial justice ultimately ruined her businesses, as they were boycotted by segregationists of the day, and her husband was ousted as a hospital administrator.
• Charles M. Dunagin is the retired editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb. He lives in Oxford.
