Edna Blanchard Lewis (c. 1876 − December 25, 1933) was an insurance broker.[1]

She was born in Dutchess County, New York; her year of birth is given in a 1910 article as about 1876,[2] and in her obituary as about 1882.[1] She graduated from Detroit Normal School and became a teacher, and taught for ten years in New York, both at public schools and at the Institute for the Blind.[1][3] She then became an insurance agent. Most of her business came from the women's colleges of Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and Mount Holyoke.[4] After working as an agent for some time, she became an independent broker, and set up an office in New York's financial district, on Pine Street.[2] In 1906, in the wake of the insurance scandal of that year,[3] she expanded this into a company, the Women's Insurance Department, employing only women, and by 1910 she had licenses to operate in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.[2] In 1910 she contributed an article about how to enter the insurance field to a book on vocational opportunities for women.[5] That year she was described as managing "the only insurance department in the world run exclusively for women".[4]

She was a strong believer in women's suffrage.[2] She died in 1933 at her home in Manhattan on December 25, 1933.[1]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 "MISS E. B. LEWIS DIES; AN INSURANCE BROKER; Pioneer Woman in Field Was at Head of BureauuFormerly a Public School Teacher. I ________ ". Retrieved 2015-05-09.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "A Woman in Insurance". Business: The Magazine for Office Store and Factory. 25: 112–113. 1910.
  3. 1 2 Merchant, Abby; Austin, Annette (January 1910). "College Girls Preferred". Good Housekeeping. Phelps Publishing Company. 50: 730.
  4. 1 2 "Edna Blanchard Lewis's insurance business for women - on Newspapers.com". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2015-05-09.
  5. ↑ Perkins, Agnes, ed. (1910). Vocations for the Trained Woman: Opportunities Other Than Teaching. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company. pp. 198–200.
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