Margaret Owen started out as a Barrister after reading for a law degree at Cambridge in the early 1950s. But it was hard, in those days, for women lawyers to build successful careers at the Bar and instead she moved into the new and exciting media world of television, as a researcher, producer and interviewer in the current affairs department. This work triggered her interest, which was to be a permanent feature of her work, in how laws, politics and attitudes impacted upon the most vulnerable people in populations.

She left television for freelance work including supply teaching to bring up her four children. Before the youngest had reached his first birthday, however, her experience of working with people in poverty, for the ILEA Care Committee, led her to enrol for a second post-graduate Diploma in Social Administration at the LSE. There she gained the only Distinction of the year and was quickly appointed to a civil service job in the Cabinet Office involved with establishing closer ties between Universities and Government departments in the social science research field. But she found the then atmosphere of the home civil service stuffy and frustrating and left to join the Co-ordinating Committee for the welfare of Ugandan Asians (CCWUA), who had, in their thousands, just been expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin She had almost forgotten that she was in fact a qualified lawyer, but her talents and experience were spotted by John Ennals, the Director of UKIAS, the UK Immigrant Advisory Service, who immediately engaged her as his Senior Legal Counsel.

Representing, before tribunals, immigrants and asylum keepers, writing research reports about the situation of people in crisis overseas fired her eagerness to obtain justice for people suffering from discrimination and abuse. It also gave her the opportunity to travel, fact-find and expose hitherto hidden abuses suffered by people without a voice. She went on to head the Law and Policy Division at IPPF (International Planned Parent Federation) until her job was axed due to the cut in US funding. Consultancies with WHO, ILO, UNICEF, the Commonwealth Secretariat followed, mostly relating to status of women issues. But she had never given a thought to the status of widows in developing countries until the death of her beloved husband, Professor P.R Owen, of Imperial College in 1990.

Directing a course on Judicial Administration for RIPA international, one of her students, a Malawi Magistrate, begged help in getting hospital treatment for his infant daughter suffering from an unusual condition requiring surgery. Margaret invited his wife and baby to come to the UK as her guests. The first words the Malawi wife spoke as she entered Margaret’s house were to be the catalyst for her future and ongoing work with widows: “You mean your husband’s brothers let you stay here in this house and keep all these things?”

Flying to Los Angeles to take up a short appointment as a Visiting Professor, teaching a course on Law Women Development and Health, the words rang in her ears. Trawling through the UCLA library, she found little written on the subject of widows and her future work and life was set. To promote the status and empower the widows – in the context of human rights, AIDS, poverty, conflict, justice and democracy building. The workshop she convened at the Beijing Fourth World Women’s Conference agreed the establishment of the very first international widows’ NGO, Empowering Widows in Development (EWD) (Since renamed Widows’ Rights International). Later, at 9/11 she set up the network Widows for Peace through Democracy WPD, and there are now over 60 partners. Margaret became the Consultant on Widowhood to the UN DAW and has frequently spoken at international meetings, such as the UN CSW, and the OCHR. Her first book “A World of Widows” (ZED Books) is dedicated to “My dearest Robert, without whose death this book would never have been written”.

She is sometimes called the “Mother of All Widows”, but as wars and AIDS have caused an unprecedented rise in the numbers of widows of all ages and their poverty and exposure to violence and abuse persists, there is still so much to do. However, she knows that widows themselves must be the “agents of change”, working collectively in their own civil society organisations if they are to enjoy, on an equal basis, their full human rights. Her mission now is to see established in every country where widowhood is vilified a federation of widows, with branches and cells in every town, village and refugee or ID camp. There are still far too few.