Blanton, Annie Webb

Annie Web Blanton began teaching in 1886, at age 16, and continued to teach until at least 1899. From 1901 to 1918 Blanton served on the English faculty of North Texas State Normal College (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, where she became active in the Texas State Teachers Association. She was elected president of the association in 1916, the first woman to hold this position. Blanton was elected as the State Superintendent of Instruction for Texas in 1918, becoming the first woman in Texas to be elected to a state-wide office. She was voted into office by a male electorate as Texas women could not vote. She ran again for the office of State Superintendent in November of 1920 and was reelected. During her tenure as state superintendent a system of free textbooks was established, teacher certification laws were revised, teachers' salaries were raised, and efforts were made to improve rural education. In 1920, Texas voters also passed the Better Schools Amendment, which Blanton had proposed as a means of removing constitutional limitations on tax rates for local school districts. Blanton did not seek a third term as State Superintendent but instead, in 1922, ran unsuccessfully for the United States Congress from Denton County, Texas. She subsequently returned to the University of Texas, where she received her master's degree in 1923. She taught in the education department until 1926, then took a leave of absence to earn her Ph.D. from Cornell University. After returning to the University of Texas in 1927, she remained a professor of education there for the rest of her life. In the U.S. Census of 1940 she reported a yearly salary of $4084. In 1929 she founded the Delta Kappa Gamma Society, an honorary society for women teachers, which in 1988 had an international membership of 162,000. She also was active in national educational groups and served as a vice president in the National Education Association in 1917, 1919, and 1921.
She was born in Texas in 1871, and was single all of her life.