Dr. Patricia Bixel

The city was organized into wards.

Every ward had a male sort of head of relief for that particular ward.

But Clara Barton saw that there was a woman who was also appointed that was the sort of boots on the ground in the individual wards that distributed relief.

And this is going to be very important as the island recovers.

She models for them a way in which women can participate in civic life.

And they do this by forming a chapter of the Women's Health Protective Association.

And this was a group that had a national network.

There were WHPAs all over the country.

And so Galveston women form this.

And the first thing they do, of course, is help with the storm recovery.

They become responsible in many ways for reburying the dead.

They become responsible after the building of the seawall and the grade raising for revegetating the island.

They take on issues of sanitation.

They get sanitation improved in dairies and butcher shops and areas like that.

Of course, the only way they can do this is by lobbying their male relatives, their husbands, their brothers, their uncles, and getting those men who can vote and who are involved in politics on the island to see it their way.

But what eventually happens, of course, is that a lot of these women get involved in the suffragist movement.

Some of them become leaders in the Texas state suffrage movement.

And so there's a really direct line between storm recovery and the evolution of women and women's roles in cities and governments.

Well, there's a couple of different ways.

One, a lot of the coverage of the storm was sensationalized.