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Ann Dunham Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), born Stanley Ann Dunham, was an American anthropologist who specialized in rural development. Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her teenage years in Mercer Island near Seattle, Washington, and then spent much of her adult life in Hawaii. In an interview, President-elect 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." Early life Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas while her father was serving in the U.S. Army. She was named after her father, who gave his daughter and only child his name because he had wanted a boy. She was identified as Stanley as a child and teenager. According to a profile in Time Magazine, Ann had "endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town". The article continued: "By college, she had started introducing herself as Ann". Her parents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, met in Wichita, Kansas, and married on May 5, 1940. She was of English, Irish, German, and Cherokee descent. Ann Dunham was a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney and President Harry S Truman. After the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on December 7th, 1941, her father joined the army to help support the troops, and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita. At the end of World War II she relocated with her parents to California, Texas, and Seattle, Washington. Shortly after, the family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, in 1956, so that 13-year-old Ann could attend Mercer Island High School which had just opened. It was here that Ann was taught by teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, who taught the importance of challenging societal norms and questioning authority. As a classmates reflects, Dunham took the lessons to heart, and "she felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." Her classmate also remembers that she was "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way." One high school acquaintance described her: "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first. We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." Another student called her "the original feminist." Move to Hawaii and First Marriage After she graduated from high school in 1960, the Dunham family moved to Hawaii to pursue further business prospects in the new state. Here, Ann enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa It was here that she would meet Barack Obama, Sr., a student from Nyang’oma Kogelo in Kenya and the school's first African student. Despite firm parental opposition from both sides, Ann Dunham married Obama Sr. on February 2, 1961, in Maui Hawaii. Dunham was three months pregnant at the time of her marriage. On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama II. Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962 and was offered a scholarship to study in New York City with which he could have supported his family, but he rejected it, preferring to attend the more prominent Harvard University. Soon, Dunham and her son would return to Seattle Washington, where she enrolled in the University of Washington to continue her studies. Dunham began to miss her family deeply, and consequently, she moved back to Hawaii and later filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Second marriage Dunham met an Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro (ca. 1936–1987), at the East-West Center on the University of Hawai’i campus. They married in 1967 and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto, where he worked as a government relations consultant with Mobil Corporation, the U.S.-based international petroleum company. Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, on August 15, 1970.[9] 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. She sent the young Obama back to Hawai’i rather than stay in Asia with her, despite the decision being painful for her. Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at The Bank of Hawai’i helped pay the steep tuition at Punahou School, with some assistance from a scholarship. In the 1970s, Dunham wished to return to work, but Soetoro wanted more children. She once said that he became more American as she became more Javanese. Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawai’i 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 field work in 1977 with Maya, Barack chose not to return with her; instead he finished high school in the United States. Later Life 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 return with her; instead he finished high school in the United States. Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawai’i. Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and micro credit 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. Ann Dunham mingled with prominent leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women's rights, and grass-roots development. In 1994, Ann Dunham was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. After this diagnosis, she relocated back to Hawai’i to live near her widowed mother. She died there in 1995 at the age of 52. Following a memorial service at the University of Hawai’i, Barack and his half-sister, Maya, spread Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of Oahu. Spiritual beliefs Maxine Box, Dunham's best friend in high school, said, "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue. She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't.” When asked if her mother was an atheist, Maya Soetoro-Ng, 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, Sun Tzu — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute." "Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways." 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." 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." He continued to speak about his mother by saying 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,". In 2007 Obama described his mother as "a Christian from Kansas." He continues to say, "I was raised by my mother, ...so, I’ve always been a Christian." Also in 2007, he said in a speech, "My mother, whose parents were non practicing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution." In September 2008, the University of Hawai’i at Manoa held a symposium about Dunham. |
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