Rosalie Edge (1877-1962) was a New York socialite, first cousin to Charles Dickens, and New York suffrage party officer who served with Carrie Chapman Catt to win women’s right to vote. She lived in Asia with her British husband Charles Noel Edge 1909-1912, and settled back in New York. After suffrage was won Edge’s interest turned to casual bird watching in Central Park; a crisis in her personal life, followed by a crisis in conservation, led her to become the leader of the nature-saving movement that had grown corrupt and indolent.

Her highly visible campaigns to reform what was then known as the National Association of Audubon Societies allowed her to assume national leadership of the conservation movement in 1929, through her New York-based Emergency Conservation Committee, the key conservation protection organization from the Great Depression through World War II. Her previous experience as an electrifying suffrage speaker and pamphleteer prepared her to jolt conservationists back into action. Edge, who was also a gifted poet as well as pamphleteer, was hailed by The New Yorker in 1948 for her “widespread and monumental” achievements.

The web link www.ugapress.uga.edu/0820333417.html summarizes these.
What makes Edge’s story interesting to a cross section of men and women is that she was neither educated as a scientist, nor very experienced in the avocation of naturalist. Starting at the age of 52, it was through how she applied her disparate (and secret) life’s experiences that gave her authority and stature. In the 1930s Rosalie Edge was declared “the only woman in conservation. In the 1940s she was called “the most honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” When Edge died in 1962 at the age of 85 one of her protégé who personally knew both her and Rachel Carson wrote: “The obituaries will eulogize her, she will be elevated, no doubt, among the immortals among conservationists.” Instead Rosalie Edge slipped into oblivion and remains overshadowed by the subsequent generation of her outstanding followers, including Carson and David Brower.
(These direct quotations are excerpted from “Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature From The Conservationists.”)