Edith Cowan OBE

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Edith Dircksey Cowan (née Brown) was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1861. She would go on to power women’s rights in Western Australia from the 1890s to the 1930s. Her extraordinary life’s work was shaped by her extremely traumatic childhood. Her mother died in childbirth when she was aged five and she was sent to a Perth boarding school.

At the age of 15, her father, Kenneth Brown, was found guilty of, and hanged for, the murder of his second wife. Three years later, Edith married James Cowan, with whom she had five children. After the birth of her last child, her life as a political activist began and it echoed the rise of first-wave feminism that was gripping the Western world at the time. Cowan joined Karrakatta’s Women’s Club, eventually becoming president of this organisation where Perth women gathered to discuss the various issues that preoccupied feminist thinkers.

Cowan went on to join an array of other organisations that focused on advancing education, health and legal protections of women and children. She travelled overseas where she connected with feminists in the UK, Europe and the US and undertook additional welfare work during World War I, for which she was later awarded an OBE.

She stood for election to a Legislative Council seat in Western Australia in 1921, narrowly winning over a male opponent. This made Cowan the first woman elected to an Australian parliament. From this position she continued campaigning for women’s issues and introduced a private member’s bill that permitted women to join the legal profession, but lost her seat in 1924.

Her determination to improve the lives of women has been recognised in numerous ways, most notably in the naming of Edith Cowan University, founded in 1991, and her appearance on the $50 note.