Jean MacMullen Holloway
Holloway, Jean MacMullen (1911–1984) was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1911 and moved to Texas with her family in 1916. After graduating from the University of Texas at the age of seventeen, she married Sterling Holloway. She studied law in his office in Brownwood, TX, and at nineteen she successfully petitioned the Texas Supreme Court for permission to take the bar examination on the grounds that she was married and therefore not legally a minor (at this time twenty-one was the age at which you were old enough to vote, and was the age of majority in most areas). After passing the bar, she was granted a license to practice law in 1930r.
In 1936 the Holloways moved to Fort Worth, where she owned and managed the Commercial Employment Service. She was a licensed pilot and served at the Army Air Force Training Center in Fort Worth as assistant to Jacqueline Cochran, director of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs), during World War II.
She worked for Southwest Review from 1943 until 1945 and earned an M.A. degree at Texas Christian University in 1948, then a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas in 1950.
Jean served as the first editor of the newly established University of Texas Press from 1943 until 1945. Then, after moving permanently to Austin in 1954, she split her focus and alternated between writing and the law. She published two biographies, Edward Everett Hale (1956) and Hamlin Garland: A Biography (1960), and taught for a time in the English department at Huston-Tillotson College in 1965. She maintained a law practice with her husband and when he passed in 1976, she served as counsel to the firm.
During her time in Austin she worked for integration, most notably as a founding member of the Austin Commission on Human Relations and editor of its newsletter. She also served on the Chancellor's Council at the University of Texas and in 1970 endowed the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence in the Arts and Sciences. In 1984 she gave $20,000 -matched by the university- to endow a lectureship in the College of Liberal Arts in her husband's name. Jean Holloway died on May 20, 1984, returning home from the Soviet Union, where she had been attending a legal seminar. She is now buried in Austin Memorial Park.