Bina Cursiter was born Jacobina Watt in Edinburgh on 15 November 1854, the daughter of Philip Butler and Elizabeth Watt (née Patterson).[5] She was educated in Surrey and Nottingham before being recommended, aged 18, to work as a governess in Hungary.[5] Bina subsequently spent three years employed by Count Lajos Benyovszky, caring for his daughter Marietta.[5]
The Watt family returned to Scotland in the 1880s, settling in Glasgow.[5] In 1885, while visiting Kirkwall, Orkney, she met James Walls Cursiter, who she married in Glasgow on 29 June 1892 at the age of 37.[5][6] James Cursiter was a grocer and general merchant, as well as an archaeologist and antiquarian.[5][6] The couple's daughter, Lizzie Watt, was born in 1893.[5]
The meeting to form the Orcadian Women's Suffrage Society (OWSS) was held in the Cursiters' home in Kirkwall, Daisybank, on 25 September 1909.[2][5] Bina Cursiter became its Honorary Secretary.[2][3] Its President was Mary Anne Baikie.[7] The OWSS, who by the end of their first year had 55 members,[5] was non-militant, and Cursiter devoted much of her time to its methods - including writing to the press, staging debates, and speaking at meetings.[5] At the group's 1913 AGM, Cursiter's 'arduous and self-sacrificing services in the Cause' were noted.[5]
When Cursiter moved to Edinburgh in 1916, then aged 61,[5] she was presented with a gold watch in appreciation of her service to the Orcadian Women's Suffrage Society.[3] Once in Edinburgh, she became a member of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, and supported the Elsie Inglis hospitals for women and children.[5]