Edith Dircksey Cowan
(1861-1932)
G'day folks,
Welcome to some facts about Edith Dircksey Cowan, OBE who was an Australian politician, social campaigner and the first woman elected to an Australian parliament.
Edith Dircksey
Cowan (1861-1932), social worker and politician, was born on 2 August 1861 at
Glengarry near Geraldton, Western Australia, second child of Kenneth Brown,
pastoralist and son of early York settlers Thomas and Eliza Brown, and his
first wife Mary Eliza Dircksey Wittenoom, a teacher and the daughter of the
colonial chaplain, J. B. Wittenoom.
Edith's mother died in childbirth in 1868 and she went to a Perth boarding
school run by the Misses Cowan, sisters of her future husband; she completed
her education with Canon Sweeting, ex-headmaster of Bishop Hale's School. Her
adolescence was shattered in 1876 by the ordeal of her father's trials and
hanging for the murder, that year, of his second wife. These experiences made
her a solitary person, committed nevertheless to social reforms which enhanced
women's dignity and responsibility and which secured proper care for mothers
and children.
On 12 November
1879 in St George's Cathedral Edith married James Cowan, registrar and master
of the Supreme Court. His appointment in 1890 as Perth police magistrate gave
them permanent social and economic security and gave her an insight into the
wider society's social problems. They had four daughters and a son between 1880
and 1891.
In the 1890s
Edith Cowan became involved in voluntary organizations: she was the Karrakatta
Women's Club's first secretary in 1894 and later vice-president and president.
There Perth's leading women mastered public speaking and shared their reading
on health, literature and women's rights: Cowan's included Olive Schreiner, J.
S. Mill and Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman). A state education advocate, she
served several terms on the North Fremantle Board of Education, one of the few
public offices then open to women. She worked with the Ministering Children's
League (from 1891) and the House of Mercy for unmarried mothers (Alexandra Home
for Women) from 1894. A foundation member of the Children's Protection Society
in 1906, she pioneered its 1909 day nursery for working mother's children. The
society was instrumental in the passing of the State Children Act, 1907, which
set up the Children's Court. She was among the first women appointed to its
bench in 1915; also an early woman justice of the peace (1920), she constantly
urged the appointment of women to such positions.
Cowan was an
initiator of the Women's Service Guild in 1909 and was vice-president to 1917
when she resigned. Amongst other work, the guild undertook the fund-raising,
public meetings and government lobbying, in which she was prominent, which led
finally to the opening of the King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women in 1916.
She was secretary of the new hospital's advisory board. In 1911 she was
prominent in the creation of the Western Australian National Council of Women;
she was its president in 1913-21 and vice-president until her death. She was a
foundation member of Co-Freemasonry in her State in 1916, and the first female
member of the Anglican Social Questions Committee from 1916 and a co-opted
member of synod from 1923.
Up to 1915 the
many women's organizations co-operated confidently and harmoniously, with the
same people prominent in several of them, like Cowan, Lady James, Jane ('Jean')
Beadle, and Bessie Rischbieth and Roberta Jull. After a bitter controversy that year over
amendments to the Health Act concerning venereal disease, the movement split:
the National Council of Women and a group around Cowan, who supported the
clauses recommending compulsory notification; and a more radical group around
Rischbieth and the Women's Service Guild. The rift between these two women was
never healed.
Cowan went
overseas in 1903 and 1912 to Britain and Europe, and in 1925 to the United
States of America as an Australian delegate to the sixth convention of the
International Council. During World War I, already heavily engaged in social
welfare, she took on a wide range of war work for which she was appointed
O.B.E. in 1920. Immediately after the war women's organizations renewed their
efforts for civic rights, as part of 'the full democratic re-generation of the world',
and in 1920 legislation ended the legal bar to women entering parliament. In
the 1921 elections Cowan was one of five women candidates. As an endorsed
Nationalist for the Legislative Assembly seat of West Perth, she opposed an
independent Nationalist and T. P. Draper,
the sitting Nationalist attorney-general in Sir James Mitchell's government. The electorate had a majority of women on
the roll, but was solidly wealthy with a few potential Labor voters. She
campaigned on her community service record, the need for law and order, and for
women in parliament 'to nag a little' on social issues. She narrowly defeated
Draper to become the first woman member of an Australian parliament.
Cowan used her
term to promote migrant welfare, infant health centres and women's rights: she
'was convinced of the necessity of motherhood endowment', even defended the
idea, in parliament, of a housewives' union, and continued to press for sex
education in state schools. The Women's Legal Status Act, which she introduced
in 1923 as a private member, opened the legal profession to women. She had
taken seriously the wartime Nationalist claim to be a non-party organization,
and voted sometimes with the government and sometimes with the Opposition,
impressing neither. In the 1924 elections West Perth business interests stood a
strong candidate in T. A. L. Davy. A Labor candidate and
the continuing conflict between the two major women's organizations further
depleted her support and she lost. She failed again in 1927.
Cowan was a
founder of the (Royal) Western Australian Historical Society in 1926 and
contributed to its journal—her daughter Dircksey was its first keeper of
records. She was active in planning the State's 1929 centenary celebrations.
Until her last illness she maintained her committee and social work. Survived
by her husband (d.18 October 1937), she died on 9 June 1932 and was buried in
the Anglican section of Karrakatta cemetery. She left an estate of £161.
Colleagues erected a clock tower memorial at the King's Park gates to indicate
her place as 'one of Australia's greatest women'. She had led a group of
forceful articulate women who made the Western Australian women's movement a model;
while she shared its concern with purity, temperance and ameliorative social
work, she gave it her own rational analysis of issues and an austere
dedication. Her portrait is in the Western Australian Art Gallery.
Clancy's comment: Another outstanding woman who was ahead of her time.
I'm ....
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