Ruth Bryan Owen

Ruth Bryan Owen (1929)

Ruth Bryan Owen (born October 2, 1885 in Jacksonville , Morgan County , Illinois , †  July 26, 1954 in Copenhagen , Denmark ) was an American politician . Between 1929 and 1933 she represented the state of Florida in the US House of Representatives .

Career

Ruth Bryan Owen was the daughter of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), who was a leading politician in the Democratic Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries . He ran three unsuccessfully for the presidency , was Secretary of State of the United States from 1913 to 1915 and previously a member of Congress for the state of Nebraska . The daughter attended public schools in Lincoln and then Monticello Seminary in Godfrey . She later studied at the University of Nebraska . In 1903 she dropped out of college to marry William Homer Leavitt , a portrait painter from Rhode Island . The couple had two children until their divorce in 1909. In 1910 she married the British army officer Reginald Owen († 1928). The couple also had two children.

During the First World War , Ruth Owen was a nurse in Egypt and Palestine from 1915 to 1918 . Between 1925 and 1928 she served as a board member of the University of Miami in Florida. Politically, like her father, she was a member of the Democratic Party . In the 1928 congressional election , she was elected to the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC , in the fourth constituency of Florida , where she succeeded William J. Sears on March 4, 1929 . After a re-election in 1930, she was able to complete two terms in Congress until March 3, 1933 . These were shaped by the events of the global economic crisis. In the House of Representatives, Owen was the first woman to become a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee .

In 1932 she was no longer nominated for re-election by her party. After the inauguration of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt , Ruth Owen became the first woman ever to become an American ambassador . In this capacity she was sent to Denmark as the successor to Frederick Coleman , where she represented her country in the local government between 1933 and 1936. That year she married Borge Rohde, a captain of the royal guard. In 1945 she was a delegate at the founding assembly of the UN in San Francisco . In 1948 she became American Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Between 1938 and 1954 she was a member of the advisory committee on the reform of labor law for women in the public service. Ruth Owen died in Copenhagen on July 26, 1954.

Web links

Commons : Ruth Bryan Owen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ruth Bryan Owen in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Ruth Bryan Owen in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Ruth Bryan Owen in the nndb (English)