Sissy Farenthold was a melancholy rebel

All of us have done things we regret, and one of the things I regret deeply is my treatment of Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold at a dinner buffet I gave in honor of a writer friend. Everyone was assembled at my house except the guest of honor, who was still signing books across town. As these things go, she was late—it was around 9 p.m.—and guests were hovering around the Mexican buffet in our dining room like starving hyenas. It was Sissy who finally came up to me and asked, not too patiently, if it wasn’t time to start serving. In a burst of confusion, childlike rebellion, and just plain lack of common sense, my answer was no. Every time I think about that moment, I fall into a micro-depression. What could have possessed me to tell Sissy Farenthold that she couldn’t dig into the enchiladas? To insult a woman I had admired my entire life, an icon of Texas feminists? Over decades of private shame I have pondered the answers to these questions, and especially since her death on Sunday, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. I’ve considered the kind of woman Farenthold was—a Texas legend, to be sure, but not the kind most often honored here.

A few examples of the latter would be other Texas women in the first-name-only club: Ann (Richards) and Molly (Ivins). Ann and Molly created a sense of intimacy with their humor—they brought you in on the joke. No one particularly cared that the jokes were cover for a roiling anger—both women understood intuitively that their humor could be used to draw listeners in and (maybe) change a few minds. Sissy believed that persistence and anger and truth were enough to bring reform to Texas, and, before Ivins and Richards, she almost did it. Given the current state of our politics, it’s hard to remember that era, back in the early seventies, when a dark-haired mother of five with an undergraduate degree from Vassar and a law degree from the University of Texas started convincing voters it was time for a change. Desperately shy, she still managed to win election to the Texas House in 1968, the first woman to represent her district, based around Corpus Christi, in the Lege. She started causing trouble right away, refusing to support a resolution praising former president Lyndon Johnson. Pretty quickly, it got better or worse, depending on your persuasion, when Farenthold and 29 Republicans and other Democrats—read that again: Republicans and Democrats—became known as the “Dirty Thirty” for taking on corruption, in particular on the part of House Speaker Gus Mutscher, who was eventually convicted of bribery in what was then known as the Sharpstown scandal. By 1972, Farenthold, pondering her next move, was getting letters from the likes of one Ann Richards urging her to run for attorney general. “There is no question in my mind that the time for election of a woman to statewide office is ripe in Texas.”