Owen, Ruth Bryan, 1885-1954

<p>Ruth Baird Bryan Leavitt Owen Rohde, also known as Ruth Bryan Owen, (October 2, 1885 – July 26, 1954) was elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was the first woman appointed as a United States ambassador. The daughter of attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Mary E. Baird, she was a Democrat, who in 1929 was elected from Florida's 4th district as Florida's first female U.S. Representative and the second from the South after Alice Mary Robertson. Representative Owen was also the first woman to earn a seat on the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. She campaigned for prohibition.</p>

<p>In 1933, she became the first woman to be appointed as a U.S. ambassador, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected her as Ambassador to Denmark and Iceland.</p>

<p>Ruth Bryan was born on October 2, 1885, in Jacksonville, Illinois, to William Jennings Bryan and his wife Mary E. Baird. Ruth's father was an attorney and a three-time presidential candidate. Growing up Ruth had to move several times depending on her father's work in politics. Ruth attended public schools in Washington, D.C and the Monticello Female Academy in Godfrey, Illinois. In 1901 she began to take classes at the University of Nebraska.</p>

<p>Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of “The Peerless Leader,” former Nebraska Representative and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, inherited her father’s political gifts as a communicator and, like him, pursued a reform agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives. Known for her strenuous campaign efforts, oratory, and devotion to constituent services, Representative Owen became the first woman to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.</p>

<p>Ruth Bryan was born on October 2, 1885, in Jacksonville, Illinois. The family moved in response to her father’s rising political fortunes—first, upon his election to the Nebraska legislature, to Lincoln, when Ruth Bryan was two years old. At age five, she moved to Washington, when her father was elected to the House of Representatives. Her mother, Mary E. Baird, was a lawyer who had been admitted to the bar and, as Owen recalled years later, “I would like to emulate her. She is a thoroughly feminine woman with the mind of a thoroughly masculine man.” Ruth also doted on her father, often accompanying him on the House Floor. During the ferocious tariff debates of the 1890s, Ruth’s frequent appearances led Members to name her “the sweetheart of the House.”</p>

<p>Ruth Bryan attended public schools in Washington, DC, and the Monticello Female Academy in Godfrey, Illinois. She entered the University of Nebraska in 1901 and took two years of classes before marrying the artist William Homer Leavitt in 1903. They had two children: Ruth and John. In 1908 she served as her father’s traveling secretary during his third presidential campaign. Despite her fundamentalist father’s objections, she divorced Leavitt and, in 1910, married Reginald A. Owen, an officer of the Royal British Engineers. The couple had two more children: Reginald and Helen. The family lived at Reginald Owen’s numerous overseas duty posts. In Cairo in 1915, Ruth Owen joined the British Volunteer Aid Detachment as a nurse to care for convalescent soldiers. Owen also established a volunteer entertainment troupe, the “Optimists,” that performed at military hospitals in the Middle East. When her husband’s health failed in 1919, she moved the family to Miami, Florida, to be near her parents. For the next 10 years, she spoke on a professional lecture circuit and served as a faculty member and on the board of regents at the University of Miami.</p>