notjustaboutsex

Standing at the Millennium Hotel, I wondered who might be already be there from the group SERVAS. I had been invited as part of the Commission on the Status of Women to meet the original couch surfers’ organization to talk about peace. Eyeing a chair, I asked the sitter if she were about to leave. When I told her I was hoping to be part of a peace meet up, she became politely irate. Can you have a peace discussion while the worlds on fire” she asked.

Margaret Owen is a Barrister, Human Rights Advocate, recipient of an Oder of the British Empire, an occasional actor and a mother of 4 and grandmother. She is also ninety-three years of age.

Of course, I couldn’t let this precious person with whom I almost share a birthday disappear into the night.  I knew she had more in her brilliant mind than twenty of my younger friends and I asked her to meet me for coffee and share some of her life.  I’ve been a member of a group called International Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT), yes, lots of initials at the UN…and I’d never met anyone like her before.

The next day Margaret beat me to the restaurant and before we had barely sat down, bubbling with the enthusiasm of a school, she listed some of the areas of injustice that most concern her. Cambridge educated, she speaks beautifully and it is no surprise that she played lead roles in several of Shakespeare’s plays while there, even reciting a bit of Portia as we waited for our grilled cheese.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown

Margaret’s mother and father were born in England. Her mother’s family were originally from from Lithuania, her father Poland and have lived for three generations in the United Kingdom. Both her parents were both professionals, her mother practiced medicine. her father a solicitor. She was close to her mother but always felt that her two brothers were more important in her mother’s eyes. Perhaps this was the beginning of her understanding of patriarchy. 

After Cambridge, studying law and becoming a Barrister, she worked at Granada television in documentaries, got a degree in anthropology as well as a Degree with Distinction in Social Administration from the London School of Economics. Her entire CV could put the D in Distinguished but she does not dwell on herself. Her main concerns are the victims of discrimination across the globe. She headed the Law and Policy division of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, been a founding member of Gender Action on Peace and Security UK, and monitored trials and elections in Turkey. She is also an adviser on women and children’s rights to the Kurdish Human Rights Project.  And that’s just a few highlights.

“It was so strange to be in a room at the Church Center, where they were discussing aging as if it were something strange and here, I sit, being aged and not thinking there’s anything different about me,” she chirped.

She then raced on to the subject of UK Labor PM Keir Starmer’s cozying up to President Trump and the resignation of International Development Minister Annaliese Dodd from her job due to the cuts Mr. Starmer is making to development and aid in exchange for more funding for defense. And we are sending this money to Israel for war! she politely declaims. Owen is Jewish and spent six months in Israel in 1956 riding around on a lambretta and doing free-lance reporting. She travelled all over including Gaza and does not approve of the Israeli Prime Minister’s endless attacks on the Palestinians. In fact, upon her arrival back in London, she will stand with the JNP (Jewish Network for Palestine), a grass roots organization committed to debate on settler conflict in Palestine.  It is anti-Zionist and she has met with her local Rabbi to discuss. She hopes to get arrested.

This s knowledgeable woman has an educated opinion on so many issues. As a human rights lawyer who believes in the law: it is abhorrent that there is a government that is now flagrantly violating international laws and structures set up after World War II to secure peace and prosperity for everyone. The world has changed last March to this March since Trump.

She mentions her son Dan, now working as an anthropologist for the World Bank in East and Southern Africa, telling her that he is already seeing the suffering around him since the laws have been changed and international agencies dismantled by Musk’s raiders.

Margaret takes no prisoners. She almost bailed from the CSW last year when  Saudi Arabia had been chosen as the chair of the UN commission … a commission that is supposed to promote gender equality and empower women across the globe, the Ambassador to the UN from Saudi Arabia was chosen to chair the conference. They were unopposed in their bid for leadership despite being condemned by human rights groups and the kingdom’s record, most recently arresting a young woman activist for her twitter hashtag asking for the end of male guardianship. This appointment is a slap in the face to all the women who travel great distances and a great expense to come to New York to partake in this yearly event. Margaret’s friend, fDr. Carole Mann researcher and novelist, threatened to organize a boycott of the CSW in France unless the position was rescinded.

… instead of conclusions, I  hear political declaration.  

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 Margaret feels that the CSW’s draft should have emphasized the bush backs on women’s right rather than simply calling it progress which is uneven at best.  She was very surprised that at the opening event, it was not even mentioned once at how how much the world has changed since Trump’s election.

There’s an extreme roll back in every part of women’s lives. Who would have imagined that women’s reproductive rights in 2025 are being slashed?

Each year she returns to the US hoping to see progress; after all, she was at Beijing where so many dreams were made.

Every aspect of women’s lives has touched Margaret. When her husband, an astro physicist died in1990, she found herself a widow at 58. She never stopped working, teaching judicial administration to Commonwealth magistrates. While hosting a Malawian mother and her sick baby she learned of the crisis of widowhood around the globe. The visiting woman could not believe that Margaret was permitted to live in her own house after her husband died and keep the things that “belonged” to him.

Widows’ lives in the Global south are determined by patriarchy, misogyny and misinterpretation of religion and traditions. They are treated like chattel with no right to their land and subjected to torture. Mourning and burial rights include drinking water from the husband’s corpse, and having sex with his cousins to show she is not guilty of her husband’s death. They are raped, their possessions are taken away and they are exploited as servants in the extended family. These practices are common to many countries in Africa and South Asia, differing according to cultures and religions. They should be defined as torture and criminalized.

In the Congo they can be raped and sometimes burned alive. They are called witches and stoned to death. They can be taken as a sexual slave or sent into the desert to die.

Widowhood exports poverty. Their daughters are withdrawn from school and are sold into forced child marriages, often with much older men. They then often become child widows themselves.

Their sons then become unaccompanied child asylum seekers, desperate to access education and decent employment so that they can support their widowed mother and younger siblings. It’s a vicious circle.

All of this led Margaret to founding Widows for Peace Through Democracy…the first international organization to address human rights in the context of the state of widowhood. For her contribution to the advancement of women’s human rights, and especially for her work on widow’s rights, Margaret received an Order of the British Empire in 2013.

But that is not enough for this dynamo. She is a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan, where she served as a witness and reporter to the trials of Kurdish activists in Turkey. Turkey has an official policy in place that denies the existence of the Kurds as a distinct ethnicity. An organization of activists PKK (called terrorists by Turkey) had been formed to liberate Kurds from Turkey. Their leader. Abdullah Ocalan, was imprisoned for 25 years along with countless Kurdish intellectuals, not even permitted to see a lawyer and isolated on an island.

Margaret is a huge fan of Ocalan. She believes his writings about equal rights and society are the most progressive and the book he wrote in prison, The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan, comparable to the writings of Mandala. Ocalan is now telling his followers to accept peace, even though Turkey will not legally allow its Kurdish citizens to speak Kurdish.

One might think a woman with this gusto could be exhausting. Not true.  Her enthusiasm is catching as she is one of those geniuses who understands the limitations of others, humbly explaining everything, not to instruct, but to share. She wants you to feel what she feels and presents the facts, pouring them out of her head the way Dagwood Bumstead used to do math problems.  She admits to having a photographic memory; that’s helpful for the data, but it’s her heart that is her real strength…feeling for the down trodden and using her smarts to balance the inequities of injustice.

I thought we might order rice pudding after our shared grilled cheese, but she was having a bit of a cough and cold and not hungry.  With a coffee refill, she told me about her brand-new initiative. Drafted a few days before, she was setting up a campaign for all women in occupation—WAGLUO –whose voices are never heard at the CSW and many other places. They are too busy keeping out of harms way to get their stories out. This includes the Rohingyas, Yazidis, Kurds, Yezidis, Tamils, Baha, Baluchistans, and Kashmirs. among others.  She hopes to introduce this to the UN this year.

She also hopes that the next head of the UN will be a woman but is doubtful that the men will share the power, so is willing to settle for a man and woman held leadership…something the Kurdish leader Ocalan describes in his book she so admires.

I’m certain that her days back in Europe will be jam packed… she’s been a member for a decade of an amateur theatre group, the Questers helmed by Dame Judith Dench, and may be hitting the boards again soon.

One of her last on-stage roles was that of Maria Josefa in Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. Margaret could in real life be less like Maria who represents repressed desire for freedom. Margaret has been speaking out for truth and freedom for woman and the downtrodden her entire life. Perhaps she is more of the character Hilde Wangel in the Master Builder:

 I want my kingdom. The time’s up, you know. 

photo courtesy of N.Cohen-koan