Ann Dunham
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| Ann Dunham | |
 Photo of Ann Dunham, circa 1971 | |
| Born | Stanley Ann Dunham November 29, 1942 Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US |
|---|---|
| Died | November 7, 1995 (aged 52) Honolulu, Hawaii, US |
| Cause of death | Ovarian and uterine cancer |
| Resting place | Pacific Ocean |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., M.A., Ph.D.[1] |
| Alma mater | University of Hawaii |
| Occupation | Rural development |
| Home town | Wichita, Kansas |
| Spouse(s) | Barack Obama (Sr.) (1961–1964) (divorced) Lolo Soetoro (c. 1967–1980) (divorced) |
| Children | Barack Obama Maya Soetoro-Ng |
| Parents | Madelyn and Stanley Dunham |
Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), known as Ann Dunham, and later as Ann Sutoro[1] was an anthropologist who specialized in rural development. Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her teenage years in Mercer Island near Seattle, Washington, and much of her adult life in Hawaii. She is the mother of United States Senator and 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.[2]
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[edit] Early life
Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas[3] while her father was in the Army.[4] She was named after her father,[3] who reportedly gave his daughter and only child his name because he had wanted a boy; however, she was referred to as "Ann."[5]
Her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham, met in Wichita, Kansas, and married on May 5, 1940.[6] She had Cherokee, English and Irish heritage from her parents. She was a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney.[7]
After the Pearl Harbor attack her father joined the Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita.[3] At the end of World War II she moved with her parents to California, Texas, and Seattle, Washington, where her father was a furniture salesman and her mother worked for a bank. The family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, in 1956 so that 13-year old Ann could attend the Mercer Island high school that had just opened,[5] where teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging societal norms and questioning authority. Dunham took the lessons to heart; "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." A classmate remembers her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way."[5] One high school friend described her as: "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley [Ann] would know about it first ... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." Another called her "the original feminist."[5]
[edit] Move to Hawaii and first marriage
In 1960 Dunham's parents moved to Hawaii to pursue further business opportunities in the new state. She soon enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied mathematics and later anthropology. She met Barack Obama Sr., a student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian language class at the University.[2] When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with Obama's father Hussein Onyango Obama in particular objecting. Nevertheless, the couple married on February 2, 1961 in Maui, Hawaii, after discovering she was pregnant.[5][1] On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child in Honolulu, named Barack Obama II.[8]
Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard University in the fall.[9] Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island[9][10][11] before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled in the University of Washington.[10][9] Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaii[10] and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted.[1] Obama Sr. received a Masters degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965[12] and only saw their son again once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old.
In an interview, Senator Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years...The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."[5]
[edit] Second marriage
A few years later, Dunham met an Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro (ca. 1936-1987), at the East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus.[13] They married in 1967 and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto,[2] where he worked as a government relations consultant with Mobil Corporation, the U.S.-based international petroleum company.[14][15]
Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, on August 15, 1970.[6]
In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When the young Obama asked to return to Hawaii for high school rather than stay in Asia with her, she agreed, despite the decision being painful for her.[2] Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at The Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition at Punahou School,[16] with some assistance from a scholarship.[17]
In the 1970s, as Dunham wished to return to work, Soetoro wanted more children. "He became more American," she once said, "as she became more Javanese."[2] Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaii and reuniting with her son Barack for several years. Soetoro and Dunham saw each other periodically in the 1970s when Dunham returned to Indonesia for her fieldwork[2] but did not live together again. They divorced in 1980.[18]
[edit] Later life
Dunham was not estranged from either ex-husband, and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. She returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1977 with Maya, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in the United States.[2]
Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts.[19] In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.[20] Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Pakistan. She mingled with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women's rights, and grass-roots development.[2]
In 1994, Ann Dunham was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer; she moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother.[2] She died there in 1995 at the age of 52.[21][22] Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Barack and his half-sister, Maya, spread Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of Oahu.[2]
[edit] Religion
An acquaintance from high school has said that Dunham "touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue."[5]
Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, "I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute."[23] "Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."[24]
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."[25] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, "I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known."[26] Religion for her was "just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote.[24] In 2007 Obama described his mother as "a Christian from Kansas." "I was raised by my mother," he continued. "So, I’ve always been a Christian."[27][28] Also in 2007, he said in a speech, "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution."[1]
[edit] 2008 presidential campaign ad
A photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama was included in a 30-second television advertisement called "Mother".[22] Obama says in the ad, which focuses on his calls for health care improvements, that his mother spent her final months "more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well."[22]
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