To me, the most enigmatic feminist icon in this whole primary drama has been the woman with a man's name who's been dead for more than a decade: Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro.
When I was writing a post awhile back that could roughly be summarized as "Hillary: Is She Good for the Women?" (my answer: no), I found myself drawn again and again to this intrepid woman, 5 years older than Senator Clinton, and the life that reads more like Nadine Gordimer than Encyclopedia Brittanica. Her son told Time, "She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box", and this at a time, the 1950's, when the choices for women were still mostly constricted to house and home. Ann Soetoro apparently didn't get the memo. And while her personal choices surely cost her children some measure of stability (luckily, the candidate's grandmother, another mysterious force, was there to serve as a bedrock), Soetoro also gave them a powerful model for idealism and feminism in action.
She's described from her teen years invariably as ahead of her time, off-center, challenging conventions at every turn. The candidate's half-sister described her this way to the New York Times:
"That was very much her philosophy of life, to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places."
Obama has called her "the kindest, most generous spirit" he has ever known, but also added that she carried a certain "recklessness" in pursuing her dreams.
At 18, in the early 60's, she married a fellow student, an African, already pregnant with the future candidate. Soon Dad was gone, and she plowed ahead with her ambition to become an anthropologist. Eventually, she met an Indonesian, married him, and off they went to Jakarta, the new husband, the white woman, and the mixed-race child in tow. There the son got early morning lessons of English, Mahalia Jackson, MLK speeches and the young Obama didn't entirely appreciate it, to which she would say "this is no picnic for me either, buster."
Obama headed back to Hawaii for school, under the care of Ann's parents, a decision that friends report was very painful for the mother to make. She became more and more immersed in Indonesian culture as her husband became more and more Westernized, and eventually he is gone too. She went on to build a microfinance program more than a decade before Oprah ever started talking about it. A young female colleague said this about her to the Times:
"I feel she taught me how to live. She was not particularly concerned about what society would say about working women, single women, women marrying outside their culture, women who were fearless and who dreamed big."
Another colleague told Time that Ann once "despaired" of her son ever having a social conscience, a fear that was put to rest when he became a community organizer in Chicago. Friends say she reveled in talking about her children's accomplishments.
Last year, I remember watching Obama intently as a reporter asked him how his mother would react to her son's meteoric rise. It was a moment when his grandiloquence disappeared. He said she would cry and cry, and then, in my recollection (I couldn't find the clip), he mostly demurred. As someone who also lost a mother at a relatively young age, I have found that any success, any milestone is a celebration muted by the fact that I can't call my Mom to tell her about it. I can't help but believe that the candidate's victory this week must be made somewhat bittersweet by the fact that his indomitable Mom isn't here to watch it. I'd like to think that somewhere, she has a front-row seat. But I'm guessing Ann Dunham Soetoro, who believed in her kids, herself, and the capacity to do some good on earth, didn't believe much in angels on a cloud.
Knowing about Barack's remarkable mom moves his message out of the box of clever political dialog into the possibility that we can create the world that Ann envisioned. It's so much bigger than the hope that a woman or a black man might someday be a US president. It is the belief that raising our kids with values, investing in their education, and encouraging their capacity to dream will lift us all up, and move us to see that true power is about our ability to transform society from the bottom up.
It seems that he represents the best in all of us. He's what brings us together.
Compare what Stanley Ann's child did after college and what Hillary's child did after college.
I will not judge Hillary as Mother. I do not agree with her as a politician, but one cannot see the intimate way a Mother nurtures her child from the outside. We all have different paths to fulfill as well, and Chelsey is finding hers. Hillary is proud of Chelsey, I am proud of my Sons, we are all proud of Obama...well, most of us.
Thanks for a great post!
While not always applicable, here are surely two good examples of the old adage of the apple not falling far from the tree:
Barbara Bush : George W. Bush
Ann Soetoro : Barack Obama
More in this vein, here's a great March 2008 article on Obama that has gotten lost in media shuffle. Nothing earth-shattering, just an overview of his life and his family, up to this point, which includes stories about his grandmother, Madelyn, a "Rosie the Riveter in a bomber plant," who injected into Obama's youthful psyche, "that very midwestern, sort of traditional sense of prudence and hard work."
His mother, Ann, is here, too. A highly intelligent woman, an anthropologist, a feminist before her time. Barack's sister described her like this: She was always very good at finding a language that the other person would understand, regardless of where they were from, or their socio-economic background. And I think that’s something that’s been given to us, a major gift that’s bestowed on us.”
And yet, his mother was also a dreamer, a romantic, who used to "pull her children from bed to look at a particularly beautiful moonrise."
A nice convergence of influences. Those who say that "nobody knows" who Obama is should start here, then spend the next several months actually listening to what he has to say. I have every confidence they'll be pleased to know him.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/03/obama200803?currentPage=1
And, thank you Ann Dunhan Soetoro ... thank you so, so much!
Sounds like rationalization to me - the writer feels guilty for not supporting the first serious female candidate and is grasping at straws to excuse themselves for going for a man over a woman.
Beautiful post, I love her free spirit.