Ann Dunham

Ann Dunham
Born	Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-11-29)November 29, 1942 Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, U.S.A.
Died	November 7, 1995(1995-11-07) (aged 52) Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.
Cause of death	ovarian and uterine cancer
Resting place	Pacific Ocean
Nationality	American
Education	B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Alma mater	University of Hawaii
Occupation	Rural development
Spouse(s)	Barack Obama Sr. (1961-1965) (divorced) Lolo Soetoro (1966-1980) (divorced)
Children	Barack Obama Maya Soetoro-Ng
Parent	Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Stanley (S.) Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), known as (S.) Ann Dunham, and later as (S.) Ann Sutoro was the mother of United States Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama. Dunham was an anthropologist who later specialized in rural development. Born in Kansas, Dunham attended high school near Seattle, Washington and spent most of her adult life in Hawaii.

Early life

Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (some say Wichita, Kansas), while her father was in the military. She was named after her father, who reportedly gave his daughter and only child his name because he had wanted a boy; however, she was referred to as "Ann".

Her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham (born on March 23, 1918, raised in El Dorado, Kansas died February 8, 1992—buried in the Punchbowl National Cemetery) and Madelyn Dunham (née Madelyn Lee Payne) (who was born in 1922 and raised in Augusta, Kansas and is still living in Honolulu, Hawaii), met in Wichita, Kansas and married on May 5, 1940.

After the Pearl Harbor attack her father joined the Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita. 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 high school that had just opened, 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."

First marriage

Dunham moved to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied anthropology. There she met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a graduate student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian class. When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with Barack, Sr.'s father in particular objecting. "He didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman", Obama recalls his mother saying, in Dreams from My Father. Nevertheless, the couple married on February 2, 1961 in Maui, Hawaii.

Dunham has been described by her friends as "a fellow traveler... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were," and as "the original feminist".

Barack was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Ann was 18 at the time.

In an interview, Barack 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."

Barack Obama, Sr. left Ann and their son in 1963 to attend Harvard in Boston. Dunham and Obama were divorced in Honolulu, Hawaii in January 1964. The senior Obama obtained a masters degree in economics at Harvard and returned to Kenya in 1965 where he obtained a position in the Kenyan government. Friends report that later in life, he drank too much and became bitter and frustrated. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1982.

Second marriage

Two years after the divorce, when her son was five, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro (ca. 1936-1987), an Indonesian oil manager, whom she met at the East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus. They moved to Jakarta, Indonesia in 1967 after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto.

Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, on August 15, 1970.

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 upper school rather than stay in Asia with her she agreed, despite the decision being painful for her. In 1971, at the age of 10, Barack was sent back to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, where he attended the prestigious Punahou School. Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at The Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition, with some assistance from a scholarship.

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." They divorced in 1980.

Post-second marriage

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, concentrating on his struggle to define himself; Dunham again acquiesced, despite it being personally painful for her.

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 with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds. 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.

In 1994 Ann Dunham was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer; she moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother. She died there in 1995 at the age of 52. Her son, starting his first campaign for public office, was not present at the time of her death. Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Barack and his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, deposited her ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of Oahu.

Religion

Dunham's best friend in high school has said that she "touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue."

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 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." 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. However, 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." 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."

Dreams from My Father

She helped her son write his memoir Dreams from My Father while she was battling cancer. Obama wrote:

During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character.

Obama noted in the book that it was Ann rather than his natural father who taught him about his African American heritage.

She would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me stories of schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read books handed down from wealthier white schools but who went on to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up and study in the mornings… Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

Obama noted in the book that he might have written a different book if he had known she was dying when he wrote it:

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book—less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

2008 presidential campaign ad

A photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama was included in a 30-second television advertisement called "Mother". 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."