Sara Dowse

Sara Dowse (born 12 November 1938) is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist.

Dowse was born Dale Sara Rosenthal in Chicago on 12 November 1938.

Her mother, Louise Fitch, was a radio actor and her father, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal, was an attorney.

At age three, after the United States entered World War II, Dowse moved with her mother from Chicago to New York City and later attended PS 6 in Manhattan.

Her parents had divorced before her father was drafted in 1942.

A lieutenant, he served in the Pacific as an army pilot and received a Purple Heart.

After his discharge, he settled in Los Angeles with his new wife and family as one of Hollywood’s first entertainment lawyers.

In 1947, Dowse's mother also remarried; with her mother and stepfather, scriptwriter Jerry D. Lewis, she moved to Los Angeles and divided her time between her two families.

She attended El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills, Emerson Junior High School and University High School in West Los Angeles.

During this period, Dowse's mother and stepfather were blacklisted as a result of McCarthyism.

After graduating from high school in June 1956, Dowse enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) the following September and took voice lessons after her classes.

During the summer of 1957 she met John Dowse, an Australian from Sydney who was attending UCLA on a rugby union scholarship.

In May 1958, they married.

Dowse dropped out of college and became a trainee at Bullock's, a Los Angeles department store.

She was later a bookkeeper at Litton Industries, a high-security missile factory.

Pregnant with their first child, Sara agreed to move to Sydney.

John had a job with his father, a North Sydney publican who had begun building housing to meet postwar demand.

He and Sara sailed on the P&O ocean liner Orcades, and arrived in Sydney on 3 October 1958.

On 24 December, their son Joseph was born.

A second son, Jason, was born in 1960, followed by Joshua in 1964.

A daughter, Jessica, was born two years later.

The Dowses moved to Canberra in 1968, separated in 1972 and divorced in 1977.

In 1972, after Sara and John separated, she began tutoring in the professional-writing course at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra).

The position was part-time (like the Nelson job); to support herself and her children, she joined the Australian News and Information Bureau (ANIB) and applied for Australian citizenship.

Dowse was obligated to renounce her U.S. citizenship, since dual citizenship was not an option in either country at the time.

Dowse held this position from 1974 to 1977, under two prime ministers (Edward Gough Whitlam and John Malcolm Fraser), and resigned in protest of the office's removal from the prime minister's department.

Her first novel, West Block, is based on her experiences in government and was one of the first works of fiction set in Australia's capital Canberra.

A second relationship, with biochemist Lynn Dalgarno, began in 1975 and lasted 19 years.

Dowse and Dalgarno had a son, Samuel, in 1980 before their relationship ended in 1994; she married Tony Taylor in 1996.

Two years later, they went to British Columbia and settled in the small fishing town of Sidney on Vancouver Island.

Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.

They lived in Canada for five-and-a-half years before returning to Australia in 2004, and were living in Manly, New South Wales when Taylor died in 2015.

Three months after Joseph's birth, Dowse enrolled in night classes at Sydney University.

She continued her studies intermittently between children, and passed the last course for her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Australian National University (ANU) after the family moved to Canberra.

Dowse's first job after graduation was Canberra field editor for publisher Thomas Nelson Australia.

Part of her brief time at Nelson was spent searching for potential manuscripts at ANU's Institute of Advanced Studies and School of Asian Studies, and she met two research assistants who were members of the women's liberation group that had begun in the capital.

Dowse began attending meetings and was swept up by the movement, abandoning a law course to devote her free time to activism.

Like other feminists, she wrote discussion papers and spoke in public about the need for wide-ranging social change for women.

Dowse posted a blog, Charlotte is Moved with political, social and artistic themes, from 2013 to 2016.

She was a Canberra public servant, the inaugural head of the first women's unit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and oversaw the unit's growth from a section to an office.