Constance Duncan

Who was Constance Duncan?

Ada Constance Duncan was an Australian welfare activist.

Duncan was born at Canterbury to agent Andrew William Bartlett Duncan and Alice Dalby, née Bellin. She attended the local Baptist school, Hessle College, before achieving a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1917, followed by a Master of Arts in 1922. She was one of the first women at the university to own a motorcycle, and offered rides during World War I to raise money for the Australian Red Cross Society. She worked for the Australian Student Christian Movement for two years before being appointed Australian secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, in which capacity she was sent "on loan" to the Japanese association.

Duncan worked in Tokyo and Kyoto while in Japan and studied at the London School of Economics in the 1928–29 period. She returned home in 1932 due to her father's illness, and joined the Lyceum Club. Secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian League of Nations Union and the Bureau of Social and International Affairs from 1934 to 1941, she attended the Institute of Pacific Relations conference at Yosemite in California as the Victorian delegate.