Born: 2 August 1861, Australia
Died: 9 June 1932
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Edith Dircksey Brown
This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Clare Wright, La Trobe University. See below for full attribution.
Edith Cowan’s remarkable leadership in overcoming obstacles to women’s public participation was forged through personal tragedy. Born Edith Dircksey Brown on the remote station of Glengary in Western Australia in 1861 to parents, Kenneth and Eliza, who were both from original settler families in the district and were well-connected, pious and conservative, she led a happy, uninhibited early childhood. Everything changed in an instant when, six years later, Cowan’s mother died in childbirth, along with her baby. The remaining siblings were separated, and Cowan was sent to a boarding school in Perth, run by the Cowan sisters, whose brother James she would later marry. Here she developed a strong will, self-sufficiency, and an imperious set to her mouth that divulged no emotion. When Cowan was 16 years old, her father – who had descended into alcoholism, depression and despair following the death of her mother – shot his second wife in a domestic dispute. Charged with murder, he offered no defense, and was sentenced to hang. The emotional effect of his shameful death rippled down through generations.
In 1879, at the age of 18 Cowan married James Cowan, a public servant and later a magistrate. She followed her husband’s career assiduously, studying the sad and sorry cases that daily walked through his courtroom. Alive to the injustices created by poverty and lack of education, especially for girls and women, Cowan soon set her serious and critical faculties to relieving their distress. She read widely – John Stuart Mill and the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman were among her library – and believed in the importance of economic independence and higher education for women. She raised her own four daughters (she had one son) to be autonomous and capable. The Cowan home was the centre of talk and argument.
In 1894, Cowan became one of the founding members of the Karrakatta Club, a women’s literary circle intended to be an influential ‘centre of opinion’. Indeed the club’s name became synonymous with women’s suffrage in Western Australia. For the next four decades she worked to champion social reform through the rather conventional mode of middle-class women’s associations, fund-raising ventures and social networking. She fought against domestic violence, drunkenness and women’s legal disadvantage and spoke openly about venereal disease, prostitution, contraception, illegitimacy and sex crimes at a time when such subjects were not discussed in polite company. She campaigned for a specialist maternity hospital for Perth and children’s courts with female officers. By the late 1890s Cowan began to be elected to the Boards of public entities, such as the Cottosloe Education Board and the Women’s Service Guild. She assumed active leadership of many social reform organisations, including the Children’s Protection Society and the National Council of Women.
Cowan believed in enlightened and rational self-control and self-determination. She was known for her severe pragmatism, her skill, intellect, tact, untiring energy and indomitable courage. But such commitment took its toll. In 1902, and again in 1912, Cowan went to England and Switzerland to recover from debilitating health concerns, probably nervous exhaustion or depression. She travelled alone, attending suffragette meetings as a well-respected Australian sister, but did not take the opportunity to speak. After her husband’s retirement in 1912, Cowan intensified her public activities, becoming one of Western Australia’s first female Justices of the Peace. World War I led to a spate of tireless patriotic work, fund-raising for the Red Cross and starting up the Soldiers’ Welcome Home. As an ardent pro-conscription campaigner, she was an active member of the Perth Recruiting Committee.
Cowan had always argued the need for women in public life rather than just their right to it, and, in 1921, one year after Western Australia lifted the legal bar to women’s parliamentary representation, she stood for the seat of West Perth. Though her platform included many radical measures (including state kitchens, child endowment payments to mothers and day nurseries for working women) she stood as an endorsed Nationalist – the conservative party of the day. She had a shock victory, defeating, by 46 votes, the sitting member TP Draper, Attorney General in the Mitchell government and, ironically, the man who had introduced the very legislation that admitted women to parliament. One newspaper noted after her victory ‘Mrs Cowan is in the remarkable position of being a Conservative, representing a conservative electorate, who has achieved a revolution in representation’ (The Westralian Worker, 19 August 1921). She was also the first woman to be elected to a British legislature anywhere in the world.
As a parliamentarian, Cowan refused to toe the party line, amending legislation in ways that would benefit (or at least not discriminate against) women and their children. In introducing the Women’s Legal Status Bill, which stated that no person be disqualified from any public, civil or judicial function by sex, Cowan paved the way for our current Sex Discrimination laws. The bill was passed without amendment. The price of Cowan’s political courage was her seat. Having lost the support of her party she failed to win the next election and was unable to gain traction as an Independent.
It is poignant that the woman who most successfully pioneered women’s political representation in Australia carried a demeanor so unlike the modern woman dancing across the public imagination on the cinema screens of the 1920s: loose, carefree, uninhibited, liberated. Cowan’s face never showed a glimmer of lightness or humour. She remained reserved, stern and stoic, and even her own five children found her cold and aloof. Her childhood had forged a distrust of sentiment and vulnerability. Her public persona was repressed, abrupt, tactless and impatient. Cowan died in 1932. A university in Perth is named in her honour, and her image appears on the $50 bill.
The following is excerpted from The Dictionary of Australian Biography by Percival Searle, published in 1949 by Angus and Robertson and republished by Project Gutenberg.
COWAN, EDITH DIRCKSEY (1861-1932), social worker, was born at Geraldton, Western Australia, on 2 August 1861. Her father, K. Brown, was the son of F. Brown who came to Australia in 1841, her mother was the daughter of the Rev. J. B. Wittenoom, the first colonial chaplain in Western Australia, who arrived in 1829. Miss Brown was sent to a school kept by the Misses Cowan at Perth, and was also instructed by Canon Sweeting at Guildford. In 1879 she married James Cowan, registrar and master of the supreme court. The care of her children and her home kept Mrs Cowan occupied for many years, but in the meanwhile her husband had become a police magistrate, and from him she learned much about cases of distress among women and children. She became interested in social questions, the franchise for women, day nurseries, and the boarding-out system. In 1912 she was appointed a member of the bench of the newly-formed children’s court, and sat regularly for 18 years. During the 1914-18 war she was a prominent member of the red cross centre and other war activities, and in 1920 became a justice of the peace and was made an O.B.E. At the general election for the legislative assembly held in 1921 she defeated T. P. Draper, the attorney-general, and became the first woman member of parliament in Australia. She lost her seat in 1924, but during her three years in parliament she succeeded in amending the administration act so that mothers were placed in the same position as fathers when children died intestate, and she also introduced the women’s legal status act. She had become a member of the Anglican synod in 1922, and in 1926 she was one of the first women appointed to its provincial synod. She was also one of the first women members of the Perth hospital board, and other institutions she supported and worked for were the King Edward Memorial Hospital, the House of Mercy, afterwards the Alexandra Home for Women, the Infant Health Centre, and the Ministering Children’s League. She died at Perth on 9 June 1932 and was survived by her husband and three daughters.
Mrs Cowan was a well-known figure in Western Australia. She was a good speaker and a thoroughly level-headed and capable woman whose life was given up to the betterment of the community.
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Work cited
Clare Wright, ‘Cowan, Edith Dircksey’, in The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2014, https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0162b.htm, accessed 16 January 2022.