Rosa Welt-Straus (1856–1938) was a suffragist and feminist. Born in Austria, she was the first girl in that country to graduate from high school, and the first Austrian woman to earn a medical degree, as well as the first female eye doctor in Europe. She earned her medical degree in 1878 from the University of Bern. She had three sisters, Ida, Leonora, and Sara. After she and one of her sisters came to America, she worked as an eye surgeon in the eye hospital and the Women's Hospital in New York. She married businessman Louis Straus and had a daughter, Nellie Straus-Mochenson. In 1904, she participated in the first congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance as a member of the American delegation. She continued to participate as such for some time, and later represented the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Israel at these assemblies.
