RARE! “1st Female Ambassador" Ruth Bryan Owen Hand Signed 2X3.5 Card

Description: Up for auction "1st Female Ambassador" Ruth Bryan Owen Hand Signed 2X3.5 Card. ES-7249E 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.[1] Representative Owen was also the first woman to earn a seat on the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. She campaigned for prohibition. 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. 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. In 1903 Bryan dropped out of the University of Nebraska to marry William H. Leavitt, a well-known Newport, Rhode Island portrait painter. The couple met when he was painting Bryan's father's portrait. The couple had two children before divorcing in 1909. Bryan married Reginald Owen, a British Army officer, in 1910, and had two more children with him. Her second husband died in 1928. She spent three years in Oracabessa, Jamaica, where she oversaw the design and construction of her home, Golden Clouds. It is now operated as a luxury villa. Owen kept her home in Jamaica for more than three decades and spent many winters there, particularly in later years when she lived in Denmark and New York City. She detailed her time in Jamaica and experiences at Golden Clouds in her book, Caribbean Caravel. During World War I, Bryan served as a war nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in the Egypt–Palestine campaign, 1915–1918. She also served as a secretary for the American Women's War Relief Fund. Owen first ran for office in 1926 for the Democratic nomination for Florida's 4th congressional district. It was a year after the death of her father. It then included nearly the entire east coast of the state from Jacksonville to the Florida Keys: with Miami, Orlando and St. Augustine. She lost by fewer than 800 votes. From 1925 to 1928, she was an administrator at the University of Miami. Two years later, after the death of her husband, she ran again. Since Owen played a significant role when hurricane hit Miami in 1927 and put effort on promotions on newspapers, she won over Sears by more than 14,000 votes and was elected to Congress in November 1928 and began her term of office on March 4, 1929, while a widow and mother of four. Her election was contested on the grounds that she had lost her citizenship by marrying an alien. By the Cable Act in 1922, she could petition for her citizenship, which she did in 1925, less than the seven years required by the Constitution. She argued her case before the House Committee on Elections, saying that no American man had ever lost his citizenship by marriage. She said that she lost her citizenship because she was a woman, not because of her marital status. The U.S. House of Representatives voted in her favor. Owen ran for re-election in 1930, defeating Daytona Beach attorney Dewitt T. Deen by a wide margin in the June Democratic primary election. As the Republican Party was running its first primary campaign in Florida history in 1930 and did not nominate a candidate to run against the Democratic nominee, the pro-prohibition Owen was heralded in the press as presumably having won re-election by virtue of her Democratic nomination. Owen's two-year term won in 1930 would prove to be her last, however, as in the 1932 Democratic primary, she was defeated by Democratic candidate J. Mark Wilcox, who advocated the repeal of Prohibition. Her Congressional career thus came to an end in March 1933.

Price: 69.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2025-01-21T20:11:41.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD