Elsie Bowerman

Elsie Bowerman, ca.1910

Elsie Edith Bowerman (born December 18, 1889 in Tunbridge Wells , Kent , England , † October 18, 1973 in Hailsham , Sussex , England) was a British author , lawyer and active suffragette .

Life

Elsie Bowerman was the only child of William Bowerman (1829–1895) and his wife, Edith Martha Barber (1864–1953), born in 1889. Her father died when she was a child. Her mother married Alfred Benjamin Chibnall for the second time. Bowerman attended Wycombe Abbey Girls' School in High Wycombe . There she met Frances Dove DBE , one of the founders of the school and an active women's rights activist. Bowerman wrote and published Dove's 1966 biography, Stands There a School: Memories of Dame Frances Dove, Founder of Wycombe Abbey School .

She left Wycombe Abbey in 1907 and spent time in Paris before studying at Girton College , Cambridge . There she graduated in 1911. Along with her mother, Bowerman became an active supporter of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1909 .

On April 10, 1912 Bowerman and her mother walked in the English Southampton as passengers first class aboard the new British luxury liner RMS Titanic , which a week later in New York should enter. They wanted to visit relatives of their late father in the USA. Both women occupied cabin E-33 and survived in lifeboat No. 6, in which Alice Cleaver , Margaret Brown , Helen Candee , Frederick Fleet , Major Arthur Peuchen , the daughter of US politician James A. Hughes , Eloise Hughes Smith, the New York factory owner's wife Elizabeth Rothschild (aunt of Dorothy Parker ) and Sigrid Lindström, niece of the former Swedish Prime Minister Arvid Posse , sat. Elsie Bowerman and Edith Chibnall were taken to New York with the other survivors aboard the RMS Carpathia .

Bowerman later described the experience as follows:

“We were told to row away from the ship as soon as possible to avoid any possible suction. We did that too. To operate an oar, in the middle of the Atlantic, surrounded by ice ... that is a strange experience. "

During the First World War , Bowerman served as a nurse in Europe, including Romania and Russia . In March 1917, in Saint Petersburg , she witnessed the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the subsequent Russian Revolution , about which she kept a diary. She was also part of Evelina Haverfield's Women's Emergency Corps. On her return to England, she supported the WSPU's efforts to motivate men to join the armed forces and women to work on the front lines.

After the war, Bowerman became secretary to the Women's Guild of Empire. She also studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1924. She was the first woman at the Old Bailey . Bowerman practiced until 1938. In the same year she helped Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, found the Women's Voluntarily Service . During World War II , she worked for the Royal Voluntary Service, the Ministry of Information (1940-41) and the BBC's Overseas Service (1941-45). In 1947 she helped found the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Elsie Bowerman was unmarried and had no children. In later years she lived with her mother in the southern English coastal town of St Leonards-on-Sea . She died of complications from a stroke in 1973 at the age of 83 .

Works

• Elsie Bowerman: Stands There a School: Memories of Dame Frances Dove, Founder of Wycombe Abbey School . Brighton : Dolphin Press, 1966.

swell

• Biography of Elsie Bowerman in Encyclopedia Titanica
• Elsie Bowerman's CV
• Dictionary of National Biography by Elizabeth Crawford, Bowerman, Elsie Edith (1889–1973) , 2004