Activist and author Ruthe Winegarten died last week at 74, leaving behind a definitive retelling of Texas’ forgotten histories – digging the stories of blacks, women, and Latinos out of the attics and basements that might otherwise have been their final resting places. She also midwived the works of more than one generation of women writers, artists, and scholars. Friends remember that Winegarten’s Texas drawl – pronounced when she was proud of you – virtually disappeared when she was haranguing you to work harder on your own projects. “She would feed you and comfort you and then she would kick your ass and make you finish what you were working on,” says daughter Debbie Winegarten. “She kicked a lot of people’s asses.”
Fifty before her first book was published, Winegarten became relentlessly prolific. In 25 years, she wrote and co-wrote 18 books, rediscovering almost everything ever forgotten about the history of women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Jews in Texas. “She was just a storyteller,” says Janice Cohen, a friend of Winegarten’s since the 1970s. “She would tell the most amazing stories, and it would just suck you in.”
Winegarten had a well-known penchant for luring the unsuspecting into collaborating on her projects. Poet Teresa Palomo Acosta thought she would be doing a little research on Winegarten’s latest historical project in exchange for cheap rent in Winegarten’s house. She ended up co-authoring what would be Winegarten’s last book, Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History, published in 2003.
Winegarten was a radical from her early teens, when she was a member of the Texas Communist Party and the Dallas Labor Zionist Party. (She later moved away from Zionism to become a vocal supporter of Israeli-Palestinian compromise.) After her marriage, she remained politically active through the channels available to women at the time – the League of Women Voters, the Jewish Welfare Federation of Dallas, the North Dallas Democratic Women’s Club. In the early Seventies, Winegarten and fellow North Dallas housewife Ann Richards – you know her – started a sketch comedy group they called “Political Paranoia.” Winegarten’s children recall her and Richards dancing and singing around the house, wildly costumed, rehearsing.
It was Richards who founded the Texas Women’s History Project in 1974, after a visit to a state history collection with her 8-year-old daughter Cecile. Reportedly, Cecile turned to Richards after they had walked through the exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures and demanded, “Mom, where are all the women?” Winegarten soon signed on as the project’s curator and research director. She and Richards spent two years combing courthouses, libraries, and attics of private houses for evidence of women’s impact on Texas history. The letters, deeds, news clippings, and artifacts they found became a touring museum exhibit in 1980, then a permanent collection at Texas Woman’s University in Denton.
The project was the touchstone for Winegarten’s first book, the Texas Women’s History Bibliography. That book spun off into a second, Texas Women: A Celebration of History, which Winegarten co-wrote with Sherry A. Smith and Mary Beth Rogers, herself an activist and author, and today the (soon-to-retire) CEO of KLRU-TV.
With black entrepreneur and activist Annie Mae Hunt, Winegarten co-authored I Am Annie Mae, Hunt’s oral history-cum autobiography, in 1983. The granddaughter of slaves, Hunt did a backbreaking stint as a “domestic” in east Texas before making a modest fortune through the sales of Avon cosmetics. Some prodding from Winegarten to fellow author and songwriter Naomi Carrier turned I Am Annie Mae into a nationally touring musical.
Winegarten’s work was exhaustive. When publishers urged her to narrow the focus of her books – to write about just one era or issue – she would widen it instead. The sprawling scope of work is clear from their titles: Black Texas Women: A Sourcebook, or Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923-1999. Collaborators recall her last-minute additions to manuscripts: Winegarten always had one more name to include, or one more story to add.
“I dare you to find five Jewish women in Texas history that Ruthe hadn’t already found,” says UT graduate student Anne Glickman, who works with the Austin Women’s Commemorative Project. “She laid all of the groundwork. We just have the obligation of building on it.”
In April, Winegarten got a grant from the Texas State Historical Association to finish her latest project, a college textbook on Texas women’s history. Work on the book had been disrupted by Winegarten’s worsening depression. In a 2002 interview with online journal AustinMama, Winegarten described her “biggest challenge” as “health … working with less energy. Things are more difficult.” On June 14, Winegarten died in an assisted-living facility, an apparent suicide.
History, it’s often said, is always being made. It is also always dissolving – covered, distorted, pushed aside in our seemingly limitless capacity to forget. Winegarten’s work grew first out of the consciousness-raising push of the midcentury women’s movement, but it came to embody the changing idea of history. To modern scholars, history is not a catalog of battles and treaties, but a story about how we live and have lived, a record of change and continuity. Women are half of that story, and to forget them is to forget half of history. A generation later, it might have been too late to recover the story of women like Annie Mae Hunt. They could have been lost to us. Thanks to Winegarten they are not.
This article appears in June 25 • 2004.