07/26/2026
Celebrating 125 years in 2026, Texas Woman's University started as a bold idea Denton thought worth fighting for.
Fourteen different Texas cities lined up in 1900, each one trying to convince a state commission that their town, not any of the others, deserved to host a brand new college built specifically to educate young women, and it was Denton - offering seventy donated acres of land and a thirty thousand dollar bonus - that finally won the bid.
Texas Woman's University started as The College of Industrial Arts for Women (CIA) in 1901, when the state legislature finally authorized a college that generations of advocacy groups, including the Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, had spent the entire previous decade demanding. Enabling legislation had failed repeatedly throughout the 1890s until the state Democratic Party adopted the idea as an official platform plank, finally pushing it through.
The school's original name reflected the era it was born into just as plainly as its mission did, chartered as the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences, a founding name that cannot honestly be left out of its story. The same legislative session that created the school also required that four of its nine governing regents be women, and Helen Stoddard, Mary Eleanor Brackenridge, and Eliza Johnson became the very first women ever to sit on the governing board of any Texas university. The school opened in Denton in 1902, renamed the Girls Industrial College the following year, and conferred its first degrees in 1904. It became the first institution in Texas to offer instruction in home economics, and its graduates went on to make up the overwhelming majority of the state's secondary home economics teachers for decades afterward. The school changed its name twice more over the following decades before finally becoming Texas Woman's University in 1957, admitting men at the graduate level in 1972 and then at the undergraduate level by 1994.
Texas Woman's University stands today as the largest state-supported university for women in the entire country, an institution whose founding name reflected the limits of its era even as its mission of education for women has pushed steadily forward past them. Texas history holds progress and exclusion side by side more often than most people realize, and this school's own story carries both. 🎓
