Inez Bensusan

Inez Bensusan (11 September 1871 – 10 October 1967) was an Australian born Jewish actress, playwright and suffragette in the UK. She was a leader of the Actresses' Franchise League and the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage.

Life Bensusan was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Sydney, Australia on 11 September 1871. Her father, Samuel Levy Bensusan was an agent for miners and her mother was Julia Rosa Bensusan . She was the eldest of the couples ten children.

Bensusan studied at the University of Sydney, Bensusan and her family moved to England in 1894. initially as the honorary organising secretary. Bensusan wrote three one-act plays for the League and became head of their play department when it was established. Bensusan persuaded other women writers and sympathetic male writers to write plays, monologues or duologues for the League to perform. She made appeals in women's suffrage publications for actresses to send her their touring schedules so that she could cast them in AFL productions.

In 1911, the suffragists were boycotting the 1911 census. As part their protest The Apple by Bensusan was performed at one o'clock in the morning. This was the second time that play was performed.

The following year Bensusan was on the executive committee of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, after it was founded in 1912. She was also a member of the Women Writers' Suffrage League (WWSL).

Bensusan's troupe had one successful season, performing The Gauntlet by Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and La Femme Seule by French dramatist Eugène Brieux. Bensusan went on to entertain the Allied armies of the occupation in Cologne then with the British Rhine Army Dramatic Company during the war. Later in life she also became active in the Women's Institute (WI) and campaigned on issues of child welfare. Adam Bede (1918) Perfect Ladies (1909) Nobody's Sweetheart (1911) True Womanhood (a film) (1911).

Other "The Apple" in Votes for Women and Other Plays (2009), London: Aurora Metro Books. Croft, S. Cockroft, I. (2010). Art, Theatre and Women's Suffrage. London: Aurora Metro Books.