Marie Grace Augustin, OBE (2 June 1897 – 30 March 1996), commonly known as Grace Augustin, was a Saint Lucian businesswoman and politician. After attaining a nursing and midwifery degree, she studied law, but was refused permission to take a bar examination based on her gender. Instead, Augustin became the first woman in Saint Lucia to manage a large estate, becoming a planter. She was the first woman to be nominated as a parliamentarian in St. Lucia and become the first female member of the legislature. Early life Marie Grace Augustin was born on 2 June 1897. She was the seventh child of eleven siblings and grew up on her parents' estate, D’aubayan, in Micoud, Saint Lucia. Active and inquisitive, Augustin was a tomboy who enjoyed swimming and riding horses. After completion of her high school studies in Antigua, Augustin passed her Cambridge exams in July 1912. She went on to further her education, studying to be a nurse and midwife, attaining her certificate in 1918 from Victoria Hospital. Articling as a clerk in her brother Elwin's law firm, Augustin studied law for three years. She would have been the first woman lawyer in the Commonwealth Caribbean when she attempted to take the bar exam in 1923, but she was refused based on the fact that she was a woman. Career Upon the death of her brother, who had been managing her parents’ estate, Augustin took his place become the first woman to manage a plantation in St. Lucia. She implemented many innovative ideas for the time. Travel by horseback to the capital, Castries, was at that time a two-day journey. Augustin reduced travel time to four hours by riding her motorcycle, which she had imported from England. She opened a grocery store for the surrounding community so that they would not have to make the long journey for supplies, as well as establishing a clinic for medical care. Augustin trained local women as staff for the clinic and arranged for a doctor to visit the community twice a week. Augustin experimented with different crops, growing cacao, coffea, coconut, mangoes. She was the first person to plant coconuts on a large scale, seeing it as a means to expand the copra industry. When refrigerated ships made further diversification possible, Augustin went into banana production, which soon became the predominant crop. When the local banana crop was infected by blight, Augustin