She is known for her advocacy for women's rights and her role in removing racist and sexist language from primary school readers in California.
[1][2] Ewing was born Ann Drayton Heuser on November 19, 1930, in the upstairs bedroom of her family's home located in Wytheville, Virginia.
[1][4] Ewing began her activism as a college student and participated in the civil rights movement in the segregated south when she was 20 years old.
[5] In the early 1970s, she joined the San Diego County Chapter of NOW, the National Organization for Women, and began working on the Education Task Force.
[citation needed] On June 7, 1974, she wrote a guest editorial in The San Diego Union entitled, "Are California's textbooks fair to Jane?