Ruth Bryan Owen was the daughter of famed orator and Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. She was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on October 2, 1885. During World War I, she served as a nurse in the Egyptian-Palestine campaign. She lived in Coral Gables, was Vice President of the first Board of Regents of the University of Miami from 1925 to 1928 and taught speech at the university from 1926 to 1928. A Democrat from Florida, Ruth Bryan Owen was a member of the Seventy-first and Seventy-second Congresses (1928-1933) and was the first woman elected to Congress from the South. She was also the first congresswoman to serve on a major committee when she became a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. She worked with environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas to help create Everglades National Park. In 1933 she was appointed Minister to Denmark by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, thus becoming the first American woman to hold a major diplomatic assignment and she was President Harry Truman's appointee to the United Nations General Assembly. Ruth Bryan Owen died while on a visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, July 26, 1954.
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