Her eldest child, Mary, would later move to Texas, where in Fort Worth she worked professionally as a social worker; however, Ethel's younger girls, Virginia and Armilda Jane, followed their mother into show business as actresses.

Well known in summer stock by her tenth birthday, she was offered a film contract at a time when the popularity and rising success of Shirley Temple on screen prompted various studios to conduct searches for other young talented performers, but her mother decided against the move to motion pictures.

Put under contract with RKO Pictures, she was mentioned in Louella Parsons' November 26, 1946 column, regarding "an interesting announcement" soon to be made concerning "William Hornstein, a Los Angeles business executive",[3] but no further details were revealed until over three years later, when another story described Virginia Owens' 1950 marriage to University of North Carolina graduate William A. Loock Jr.[4] During her brief 1946–48 sojourn into film acting at RKO, the sole on-screen credit she received was for playing dance-hall girl Ginger Kelly, fifth-billed second female lead in Zane Grey-based Thunder Mountain, the first of 29 entries in Tim Holt's 1947–52 B-western series.

[citation needed] At the start of the Depression 1930s, the Owens family left Milwaukee to settle in New York City, where Ethel Owen, now in her late thirties and early forties, found steady work in regional theatre, radio plays and even the black operetta, Africana, with a mixed cast, which had its November 26, 1934 opening night at Broadway's newly renamed Venice Theatre disrupted by a man claiming to be the story's uncredited co-author.

The production, with 115 cast members, including Ethel Owen in the non-singing role of Parthy Hawks, the mother of Magnolia, played by Jan Clayton, counted 418 performances, closing on January 4, 1947 — the longest-running revival of a stage musical at that point in Broadway history.

[4] Starting in 1947–48, at the dawn of a period referenced as the Golden Age of Television, Edith Owen began appearing in the numerous live drama series emanating from New York.

Most comments focused on the comic timing she displayed in the show's Honeymooners sketches as Alice Kramden's insult-dispensing mother who specialized in acid-tinged putdowns of her son-in-law Ralph, especially when referring to his weight and low-paying job.