Elizabeth Agnes Dwyer: A Trailblazing Writer, Lawyer, and Librarian (1866–1944)
Revised by: Brett J. Derbes
Published: December 1, 1994
Updated: August 16, 2025
Elizabeth Agnes (Bessie) Dwyer, writer, librarian, lawyer, and reformer, the youngest child of Judge Thomas A. and Annie (Croker) Dwyer, was born on September 29, 1866, at Bonita, the family country home in Nueces County. Another daughter of Judge Dwyer's married Capt. Nicholas Nolan of the Nolan expedition. As a child, Bessie traveled abroad for five years, then studied under a family governess until her father's death, when she was sixteen. For the next six years she worked for the post office and for G. W. Baldwin and Company, the largest book and stationery house in West Texas. During this time she also began to write short stories and poems.
In 1868 she moved west and for three years lived in Arizona and New Mexico with a sister. When she returned to San Antonio she worked for the Galveston News, which published her stories "Mr. Moore of Albuquerque" and "A Daughter of Eve." Using the pen name Heliotrope, she published stories in the Texas Baptist and Herald and also served as a correspondent for several southern journals. In 1890 she graduated from a San Antonio business college and in November 1891 moved east to become a "congressional reporter" for the National Economist. Dwyer wrote articles for the National Farmers' Alliance newspaper on such issues as flexible currency, liquor laws, workmen's insurance, national politics, and political campaigns. Governor James Hogg appointed her a commissioner to the Chicago Exposition of 1893. In that year she became the first woman appointed to the Library of Congress, where she served as an assistant librarian until 1903. While living there, she attended Washington College of Law and earned a Bachelor of Law degree in June 1902. She was the first Texas woman to earn the degree.
Dwyer arrived in Manila, Philippines, in 1903 and was appointed by Governor William H. Taft as law clerk in the Bureau of Forestry. She later transferred to the American Circulating Library, and established a library service from 1909 to 1911. She later appeared in a portrait made in San Francisco dated to 1915. In 1919 she returned to Washington D.C., where she lectured for the Philippine Press Bureau and wrote for magazines and newspapers. In 1920 Dwyer was selected by the Philippine Islands as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, where she became the first woman in American politics to present the name of a presidential candidate to a Party convention. She was honored by the Business and Professional Women's Club of the Santa Monica Bay District on September 14, 1925, and was elected second vice-president. Dwyer was recognized throughout the East as a brilliant journalist and attorney, who also practiced law for several years in the Hawaiian Islands, where she was influential to development work. She departed the U.S. in mid-September to begin an editorial post in Manila with the Manila Tribune, the only English newspaper in the city. She made stops in Hawaii and Tokyo, Japan, before arriving in the Philippines. Dwyer was again selected to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1936, and served on the Democratic National Committee as a representative from the Philippines from 1936 to 1944. She joined the National Federation of Women’s Clubs of the Philippines and remained on the member roster from 1929 to 1944.
Elizabeth Agnes “Bessie” Dwyer was detained by the Japanese during World War II, and passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 28, 1944, at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. Her death was not widely known when she was named as a delegate to the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Bibliography:
Elizabeth Brooks, Prominent Women of Texas (Akron, Ohio: Werner, 1896). Galveston Daily News, June 18, 1893. Hawaii Tribune Herald, June 28, 1920. Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, July 20, 1944. Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, July 1, 1920. Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1920, September 27, 1925. Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). Redlands Daily Facts, June 14, 1920. Sacramento Bee, July 20, 1940. San Diego Sun, June 27, 1936. Venice Evening Vanguard, May 15, 1925, September 19, 1925, October 8, 1925, November 9, 1925. Jonathan Daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Melissa Gilbert Wiedenfeld, Women in the Texas Farmers' Alliance (M.A. thesis, Texas Tech University, 1983). Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., American Women (2 vols., New York: Mast, Crowell, and Kirkpatrick, 1897; rpt., Detroit: Gale Research, 1973-). https://philippineinternment.com/?page_id=1461.
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Melissa G. Wiedenfeld Revised by Brett J. Derbes, “Dwyer, Elizabeth Agnes,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dwyer-elizabeth-agnes.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FDW03
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- December 1, 1994
- August 16, 2025
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