Edna Owen

In March 1917 and less than a month before the US entered World War I, Owen was appointed the director of a wireless training course for women organised by the National League for Women's Service at Hunter College, New York. Owen was also chairman of the wireless division of the National League for Woman's Service.

Owen was also one of the co-founders of the Women's Radio Corps, attached to the US Army Signal Corps and established to train women as wireless operators during the war.^[3] Throughout the war, Owen also ran a radio training class at the YWCA in New York where alumni included Belle Baruch.^[4]

A mere six days after the US entered the war in April 1917, Owen offered to provide 500 licensed female wireless operators in six months. In order to achieve this highly ambitious goal, Owen campaigned tirelessly to add recruits, lecturing up to 200 young women at once in lectures in New York and Washington, D.C., on the "many wonderful opportunities" brought by the occasion of the "great world war. . . . [I]t is your duty to prepare yourselves in order that you may set men free, that they may go to the front and fight for you and yours."^[3]

Owen's daughter Elise Owen was one of her mother's trainee wireless operators and later one of the early generation of female pilots in the US and a flight instructor during World War II.^[5][2]

• Magoun, Alexander. "The Wireless Women of World War I". Archived from the original on 17 May 2014. Retrieved 16 May 2014.