Helen Edmunds Moore

Born as Sepha Helen Edmunds,^[1] she was the daughter of mechanical engineer J. H. Edmunds. She was born in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, on January 3, 1881.^[2] She worked as a nurse in Kansas City, married a railroad man whom she had treated there, and moved with him to Texas City, Texas in late 1905.^[3][1] She continued to work as a nurse in Texas City, providing the town's only medical care until 1907, when a doctor moved to the town.^[3][4] She also founded a reading room, a precursor to the town library, in 1914,^[1] and became founder and first president of the Texas City Red Cross in 1916.^[3] Her Red Cross unit helped supply bandages to American soldiers in Europe.^[1]

Moore helped campaign for women's right to vote in Texas, working for a 1915 constitutional amendment that failed to pass. She became an officer in the Texas Equal Suffrage Association,^[3] which became the Texas League of Women Voters in 1919 after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution giving women the right to vote nationally.^[1] In 1923, she became president of the Texas League of Women Voters. In the US presidential elections of 1924 and 1928 she was one of Texas's delegates to the national conventions,^[3][4] She was a supporter of Miriam A. Ferguson as Texas governor, in part because of Ferguson's anti-Ku Klux Klan position and in part for her progressive social politics. She also supported the 1928 presidential campaign of Al Smith.^[4]