Ann Dunham

"Anne Dunham" redirects here. For the British equestrian, see Anne Dunham (equestrian).

Ann Dunham Soetoro
File:BarackMom.JPG Photo of Ann Dunham Soetoro, circa 1971
Born	Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-11-29)November 29, 1942 Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US
Died	November 7, 1995(1995-11-07) (aged 52) Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, US
Cause of death	Ovarian and uterine cancer
Resting place	Pacific Ocean
Nationality	American
Education	B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Alma mater	University of Hawaiʻi
Occupation	Rural development
Spouse(s)	Barack Obama (Sr.) (1961–1964) (divorced) Lolo Soetoro (1967–1980) (divorced)
Children	Barack Obama Maya Soetoro-Ng
Parent	Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), born Stanley Ann Dunham, later known as Ann Obama, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, and finally Ann Dunham Sutoro, 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 Hawaiʻi. Her son, Barack Obama, is the President-elect of the United States and the Junior Senator from Illinois. 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."

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 known as Stanley as a child and teenager and "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", a profile in Time magazine stated. However, 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 had English and Irish heritage from her parents. She was a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney, George Bush and Harry Truman.

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 was a vice president of a bank. 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. There, 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." One high school friend 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 called her "the original feminist."

Move to Hawaiʻi and first marriage

In 1960, after she graduated from high school, the Dunham family moved to Hawaiʻi to pursue further business opportunities in the new state and she enrolled at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She met Barack Obama, Sr., a student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian language class at the University. When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with his father in particular objecting. Nevertheless, the couple married on February 2, 1961 in Maui, Hawaiʻi. On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child in Honolulu, named Barack Obama II.

Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi in June 1962, leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard University in the fall. Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled in the University of Washington. Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaiʻi and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted. Obama Sr. received a Masters degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965 and only saw their son again once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old.

Dunham returned to the University of Hawaiʻi, eventually earning a BA in mathematics on 6 August 1967, a MA in Anthropology on 18 December 1983, and finally a PhD in Anthropology on 9 August 1992.

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 Hawaiʻi 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.

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 Hawaiʻi 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 Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition at Punahou School, with some assistance from a scholarship.

In the 1970s, as Dunham wished to return to work, 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 Hawaiʻi 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 but did not live together again. They divorced in 1980, at which time she began using the name Ann Dunham Sutoro, with a modern spelling of her former husband's surname.

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.

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 Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, 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 Hawaiʻi to live near her widowed mother. She died there in 1995 at the age of 52. Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaiʻi, Barack and his half-sister, Maya, spread Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of Oʻahu.

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."

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." "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. 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."

In September 2008, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa held a symposium about Dunham.

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."