Helen Brown

Helen Louise Brown (nee Flynn) (5 June 1910 - 18 May 1994) was a Georgeland administrator, academic and politician who served as Governor of Capitalia from 1976 to 1980. She was the first woman in Georgeland to hold gubernatorial office.

Born Helen Flynn in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to a German-Canadian father and a Dutch-Canadian mother, Flynn was raised in Ontario before being accepted to study political science at the University of Capitalia in 1928. She was the only woman in her class, and had gone to Georgeland on a scholarship sponsored by the Canadian government. In 1929, when Georgeland became a republic, the right of Canadian and other Imperial dominons to reside in Georgeland was automatically revoked, and Flynn faced the prospect of deportation. She was saved, however, by a direct appeal to the university rector from the Canadian consul-general, Edward Peters, and was allowed to continue her studies. She met and married a fellow student, John Brown, at UC and became a Georgeland citizen, permitting her to remain in the country after she graduated in 1932.

For most of the next decade the Browns split their time between Georgeland, Canada and the United States, before permanently settling in New Kikipolis in 1940. Throughout that time the couple not only started a family but both Helen and John earned Masters degrees. When Georgeland entered World War 2 in December 1941, John Brown enlisted in the Georgeland Air Force, and Helen remained with the couple's two children. Unprepared to simply be a wartime mother, and with a labour shortage caused by the war, Brown put her degree to use by becoming a teacher and, in 1943, the first woman to be accepted full-time onto the UC faculty as Associate Professor of Political Science. She was the youngest woman on the faculty at 32. The same year, she completed her PhD with a treatise on the psychology of political theory.

From 1957 to 1962, Brown was Dean of the Philosophy department at UC while her husband was President of Dunlap College. In 1960, John Brown died in a motoring accident. Helen remarried in 1964, to Peter Brown (no relation). In her memoirs, she wrote that she would not have changed her name from Brown, but she fortunately didn't have to.

In 1962, Brown was appointed to the National University Council, the second woman to serve on that body and the only woman on the council for her tenure. She was awarded the McKellen Prize for Academia in 1965, the first woman to win it, and was nominated for (but did not win) the Kensington Medal in 1968.

Brown's first foray into politics was in 1972 when she ran for Governor of Capitalia. Always a political independent, Brown was the fifth woman to stand for gubernatorial office (the first being Mary Mays in 1933), and had the support of multiple feminist groups, including the National Council for Women. She finished second in a field of five candidates, but was defeated by William John Horner.

In 1976, Brown ran a second campaign against Horner and won, with 37% of the vote to his 29%. She was inaugurated as Governor on 1 May, the first woman to be the chief executive of a Georgeland state government.