Fighting for Women's Rights: The Extraordinary Adventures

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Many readers will already be familiar with Anna Leonowens. She spent six
years in Siam, now Thailand, teaching the king’s children and doing
her best to improve living conditions for the women around her. A
heavily fictionalized version of this period in her life has made its
way onto stage and screen under the title The King and I, but the Anna
of that story bears only a passing resemblance to the real Anna
Leonowens.

Fighting for Women’s Rights gives the reader a much clearer
understanding of who this woman was and why she was such a passionate
activist. Born in India to a penniless widow, little Ann Edwards knew
suffering early in her life. Both her mother and her sister were obliged
to marry out of financial necessity; in consequence, Ann lived in an
unhappy household ruled by her tyrannical stepfather. Swearing that she
would not be bound to the same fate, Ann married for love, but her
marriage was not long-lived. Her husband, Thomas “Leon” Owens, died
suddenly, leaving Ann alone to raise their two children.

In order to support herself and her family, Ann adopted a new identity.
She gave herself a new name, Anna Leonowens, and convinced her
contemporaries that she was an upper-class widow who had fallen on hard
times. Her sheer ingenuity took her to the Royal Court of Siam, where
she stayed for six years, and later to the United States and Canada.

Due to her harsh early life, Leonowens advocated strongly for human
rights wherever she went. In Siam, she talked at length with the king
about women’s rights, and eventually influenced him to a more moderate
point of view. In North America, she was active in the anti-slavery
movement, in the fight for women’s suffrage, and in improvements to
education for all. Her art school for girls, in fact, survives to this
day as the degree-granting Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Fighting for Women’s Rights does a good job of presenting Anna
Leonowens’s life in a clear and concise manner. It would be an
excellent resource for any student completing a project on this
remarkable woman.