The Texas Equal Rights Association (TERA) was the first woman's suffrage association to be formed state-wide in Texas. The organization was founded in 1893 and was an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The TERA was meant to "advance the industrial, educational, and equal rights of women, and to secure suffrage to them by appropriate State and national legislation." It was also an answer to Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg, who had stated publicly in a trip to the north that women's suffrage "had not reached Texas." The organization was firmly "non-sectarian," stating that "it has no war to wage on religion, church or kindred societies."