Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995) was an American
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
who specialized in the
economic anthropology and
rural development of Indonesia. She is the mother of
Barack Obama, the
44th president of the United States. Dunham was known as Stanley Ann Dunham through high school, then as Ann Dunham, Ann Obama, Ann Soetoro, a.k.a. Ann Sutoro, and resumed her maiden name, Ann Dunham, later in life.
[Scott (2011), p. 6]
/span>
Anyone writing about Dunham's life must address the question of what to call her. She was Stanley Ann Dunham at birth and Stanley Ann as a child, but dropped the Stanley upon graduating from high school. She was Ann Dunham, then Ann Obama, then Ann Soetoro until her second divorce. Then she kept her husband's name but modernized the spelling to Sutoro. In the early 1980s, she was Ann Sutoro, Ann Dunham Sutoro, S. Ann Dunham Sutoro. In conversation, Indonesians who worked with her in the late 1980s and early 1990s referred to her as Ann Dunham, putting the emphasis on the second syllable of the surname. Toward the end of her life, she signed her dissertation S. Ann Dunham and official correspondence (Stanley) Ann Dunham.
p. 363
/span>:
''modernized the spelling:'' The spelling of certain Indonesian words changed after Indonesia gained its independence from the Dutch in 1949, and again under a 1972 agreement between Indonesia and Malaysia... Names containing ''oe'',... are now often spelled with a ''u''... However, older spellings are still used in some personal names... After her divorce from Lolo Soetoro, Ann Dunham kept his last name for a number of years while she was still working in Indonesia, but she changed the spelling to Sutoro. Their daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, chose to keep the traditional spelling of her Indonesian surname.
Born in
Wichita, Kansas, Dunham studied at the
East–West Center and at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in
Honolulu, where she attained a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology (1967), and later received master of arts (1974) and PhD (1992) degrees, also in anthropology.
[ reprinted by:
* ] She also attended the
University of Washington in
Seattle from 1961 to 1962. Interested in craftsmanship, weaving, and the role of women in
cottage industries, Dunham's research focused on women's work on the island of
Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created
microcredit
:''This article is specific to small loans, often provided in a pooled manner. For direct payments to individuals for specific projects, see Micropatronage. For financial services to the poor, see Microfinance. For small payments, see Micropayme ...
programs while working as a consultant for the
United States Agency for International Development. Dunham was also employed by the
Ford Foundation in
Jakarta
Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...
and she consulted with the
Asian Development Bank in
Gujranwala
Gujranwala ( ur, , label=none; ) is a city and capital of Gujranwala Division located in Pakistan. It is also known as "City of Wrestlers" and is quite famous for its food. It is the 5th most populous city proper after Karachi, Lahore, Faisala ...
, Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with
Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest
microfinance
Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings ...
program in the world.
After her son was elected president, interest renewed in Dunham's work: the University of
Hawaiʻi held a symposium about her research; an exhibition of Dunham's Indonesian
batik textile collection toured the United States; and in December 2009,
Duke University Press published ''Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia'', a book based on Dunham's original 1992 dissertation. Janny Scott, an author and former ''
New York Times'' reporter, published a biography of her titled ''A Singular Woman'' in 2011. Posthumous interest has also led to the creation of the Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, as well as the Ann Dunham Soetoro Graduate Fellowships, intended to fund students associated with the East–West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
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."
[
]
Early life
Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, at St. Francis Hospital in
Wichita, Kansas, the only child of
Madelyn Lee Payne and
Stanley Armour Dunham
Stanley Armour Dunham (March 23, 1918February 8, 1992) was the maternal grandfather of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. He and his wife Madelyn Payne Dunham raised Obama from the age of 10 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Early life ...
. She was of predominantly English ancestry, with some Scottish, Welsh, Irish,
German and Swiss.
Wild Bill Hickok is her sixth cousin, five times removed.
Ancestry.com announced on July 30, 2012, after using a combination of old documents and
yDNA analysis, that Dunham's mother was descended from
John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in seventeenth-century colonial
Virginia.
Her parents were born in Kansas and met in Wichita, where they married on May 5, 1940.
After the
attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the
United States Army and her mother worked at a
Boeing plant in Wichita. According to Dunham, she was named after her father because he wanted a son, though her relatives doubt this story and her maternal uncle recalled that her mother named Dunham after her favorite actress
Bette Davis' character in the film ''
In This Our Life'' because she thought Stanley, as a girl's name, sounded sophisticated. As a child and teenager she was known as Stanley.
Other children teased her about her name. Nonetheless, she used it through high school, "apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town."
[
] By the time Dunham began attending college, she was known by her middle name, Ann, instead.
After
World War II, Dunham's family moved from Wichita to
California while her father attended the
University of California, Berkeley. In 1948, they moved to
Ponca City, Oklahoma, and from there to
Vernon, Texas, and then to
El Dorado, Kansas
El Dorado ( ) is city and county seat of Butler County, Kansas, United States. It is situated along the Walnut River in the central part of Butler County and located in south-central Kansas. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city ...
. In 1955, the family moved to
Seattle,
Washington, where her father was employed as a furniture salesman and her mother worked as vice president of a bank. They lived in an apartment complex in the
Wedgwood neighborhood where she attended
Nathan Eckstein Junior High School.
In 1956, Dunham's family moved to
Mercer Island, an
Eastside suburb of Seattle. Dunham's parents wanted their 13-year-old daughter to attend the newly opened
Mercer Island High School.
[ At the school, teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging social norms and questioning authority to the young Dunham, and she took the lessons to heart: "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." One classmate remembered her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way",][ and a high school friend described her as knowledgeable and progressive: "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".][ She went through high school "reading beatnik poets and French existentialists".
]
Family life and marriages
On August 21, 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state to be admitted into the Union. Dunham's parents sought business opportunities in the new state, and after graduating from high school in 1960, Dunham and her family moved to Honolulu. Dunham enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
First marriage
While attending a Russian language
Russian (russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, link=no, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the First language, native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European langua ...
class, Dunham met Barack Obama Sr., the school's first African student.[ (online)]
(print) At the age of 23, Obama Sr. had come to Hawaii to pursue his education, leaving behind a pregnant wife, Kezia, and their infant son in his home town of Nyang'oma Kogelo in Kenya. Dunham and Obama Sr. were married on the Hawaiian island of Maui
The island of Maui (; Hawaiian: ) is the second-largest of the islands of the state of Hawaii at 727.2 square miles (1,883 km2) and is the 17th largest island in the United States. Maui is the largest of Maui County's four islands, which ...
on February 2, 1961, despite parental opposition from both families.[ (online)]
("Special Democratic Convention issue") (print) Dunham was three months pregnant. Obama Sr. eventually informed Dunham about his first marriage in Kenya but claimed he was divorced. Years later she discovered this was false. Obama Sr.'s first wife, Kezia, later said she had granted her consent for him to marry a second wife in keeping with Luo customs.
On August 4, 1961, at the age of 18, Dunham gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama in Honolulu. Friends in the state of Washington recall her visiting with her month-old baby in 1961.
Regarding the 1961 visit to Washington state: "Susan Blake, otkinanother high-school classmate, said that during a brief visit in 1961, Dunham was excited about her husband's plans to return to Kenya."
Regarding her enrollment at University of Washington: "By 1962, Dunham had returned to Seattle as a single mother, enrolling in the UW for spring quarter and living in an apartment on Capitol Hill."
She studied at the University of Washington from September 1961 to June 1962, and lived as a single mother in the Capitol Hill
Capitol Hill, in addition to being a metonym for the United States Congress, is the largest historic residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., stretching easterly in front of the United States Capitol along wide avenues. It is one of the ...
neighborhood of Seattle with her son while her husband continued his studies in Hawaii.[ LeFevre and Lipson wrote: ]Mary Toutonghi ... recalls as best she can the dates she baby sat Barack as her daughter was 18 months old and was born in July of 1959 and that would have placed the months of babysitting Barack in January and February of 1962 ... Anna was taking night classes at the University of Washington, and according to the University of Washington's registrar's office her major was listed as history. She was enrolled at the University of Washington in the fall of 1961, took a full course load in the spring of 1962 and had her transcript transferred to the University of Hawaii in the fall of 1962. Along with the Seattle Polk Directory, Marc Leavipp of the University of Washington Registrar's office confirms 516 13th Ave. E. was the address Ann Dunham had given upon registering at the University.
Both Anna Obama and Joseph Toutonghi were listed as residing at the same address, in the ''Seattle Reverse Directory, 1961–1962.'' See:
When Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, he was offered a scholarship to study in New York City, but declined it, preferring to attend the more prestigious Harvard University. He left for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he began graduate study at Harvard in the fall of 1962. Dunham returned to Honolulu and resumed her undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii with the spring semester in January 1963. During this time, her parents helped her raise the young Barack. Dunham filed for divorce in January 1964, which Obama Sr. did not contest. In December 1964, Obama Sr. married Ruth Baker, a Jewish American
American Jews or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by religion, ethnicity, culture, or nationality. Today the Jewish community in the United States consists primarily of Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from diaspora Je ...
of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage; they were separated in 1971 and divorced in 1973 after having two sons. In 1965, Obama Sr. received a MA in economics from Harvard. In 1971, he stayed in Hawaii for a month and visited his 10 year old son Barack. In 1982, Obama Sr. was killed in a car accident.
Second marriage
It was at the East–West Center that Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese surveyor who had come to Honolulu in September 1962 on an East–West Center grant to study geography at the University of Hawaii. Soetoro graduated from the University of Hawaii with an MA in geography in June 1964. In 1965, Soetoro and Dunham were married in Hawaii, and in 1966, Soetoro returned to Indonesia. Dunham graduated from the University of Hawaii with a B.A. in anthropology on August 6, 1967, and moved in October the same year with her six-year-old son to Jakarta
Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...
, Indonesia, to rejoin her husband.
In Indonesia, Soetoro worked first as a low-paid topographical surveyor for the Indonesian government, and later in the government relations office of Union Oil Company. The family first lived at 16 Kyai Haji Ramli Tengah Street in a newly built neighborhood in the Menteng Dalam administrative village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...
of the Tebet subdistrict A subdistrict or sub-district is an administrative division that is generally smaller than a district.
Equivalents
* Administrative posts of East Timor, formerly Portuguese-language
* Kelurahan, in Indonesia
* Mukim, a township in Brunei, In ...
in South Jakarta for two and a half years, with her son attending the nearby Indonesian-language Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi) Catholic School for 1st, 2nd, and part of 3rd grade, then in 1970 moved two miles north to 22 Taman Amir Hamzah Street in the Matraman Dalam neighborhood in the Pegangsaan administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta
Central Jakarta ( id, Jakarta Pusat) is one of the five administrative cities () which form the Special Capital Region of Jakarta. It had 902,973 inhabitants according to the 2010 censusBiro Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 2011. and 1,056,896 at the 2 ...
, with her son attending the Indonesian-language government-run Besuki School one and half miles east in the exclusive Menteng administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict for part of 3rd grade and for 4th grade. On August 15, 1970, Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro.[
In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, she sent the young Obama back to Hawaii to attend ]Punahou School
Punahou School (known as Oahu College until 1934) is a private, co-educational, college preparatory school in Honolulu, Hawaii. More than 3,700 students attend the school from kindergarten through twelfth grade, 12th grade. Protestant missionar ...
starting in 5th grade rather than having him stay in Indonesia with her. Madelyn Dunham's job at the Bank of Hawaii, where she had worked her way up over a decade from clerk to becoming one of its first two female vice presidents in 1970, helped pay the steep tuition, with some assistance from a scholarship.
A year later, in August 1972, Dunham and her daughter moved back to Hawaii to rejoin her son and begin graduate study in anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dunham's graduate work was supported by an Asia Foundation grant from August 1972 to July 1973 and by an East–West Center Technology and Development Institute grant from August 1973 to December 1978.
Dunham completed her coursework at the University of Hawaii for an M.A. in anthropology in December 1974, and after having spent three years in Hawaii, Dunham, accompanied by her daughter Maya, returned to Indonesia in 1975 to do anthropological field work.Actually I had hoped to move to Jogja at midyear, but was unable to win a contract release from my old school in Jakarta (they sponsored me via an Asia Foundation grant for my first two years in Hawaii). As it turns out, however, I had plenty to do to keep me busy in W. Java, and was able to carry out reasonably complete surveys of 3 village areas within radius of Jakarta.
At present I am staying with my mother-in-law on the corner of Taman Sari inside the Benteng, but according to old law foreigners are not allowed to live inside the Benteng. I had to get a special dispensation from the kraton on the grounds that I am "djaga-ing" my mother-in-law (she is 76 and strong as a horse but manages to look nice and frail). In June I am having Barry come over for the summer, however, and will probably need to find another place, since I don't think I can stretch an excuse and say we are both needed to djaga my mother-in-law.
Her son chose not to go with them back to Indonesia, preferring to finish high school at Punahou School in Honolulu while living with his grandparents. Lolo Soetoro and Dunham divorced on November 5, 1980; Lolo Soetoro married Erna Kustina in 1980 and had two children, a son, Yusuf Aji Soetoro (born 1981), and daughter, Rahayu Nurmaida Soetoro (born 1987). Lolo Soetoro died, age 52, on March 2, 1987, due to liver failure.
Dunham was not estranged from either ex-husband and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers.
Professional life
From January 1968 to December 1969, Dunham taught English and was an assistant director of the Lembaga Persahabatan Indonesia Amerika (LIA)–the Indonesia-America Friendship Institute at 9 Teuku Umar Street in the Gondangdia administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta
Central Jakarta ( id, Jakarta Pusat) is one of the five administrative cities () which form the Special Capital Region of Jakarta. It had 902,973 inhabitants according to the 2010 censusBiro Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 2011. and 1,056,896 at the 2 ...
–which was subsidized by the United States government. From January 1970 to August 1972, Dunham taught English and was a department head and a director of the Lembaga Pendidikan dan Pengembangan Manajemen (LPPM)–the Institute of Management Education and Development at 9 Menteng Raya Street in the Kebon Sirih administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta.
From 1968 to 1972, Dunham was a co-founder and active member of the Ganesha Volunteers (Indonesian Heritage Society) at the National Museum
A national museum is a museum maintained and funded by a national government. In many countries it denotes a museum run by the central government, while other museums are run by regional or local governments. In other countries a much greater numb ...
in Jakarta. From 1972 to 1975, Dunham was crafts instructor (in weaving, batik, and dye) at the Bishop Museum
The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, designated the Hawaii State Museum of Natural and Cultural History, is a museum of history and science in the historic Kalihi district of Honolulu on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. Founded in 1889, it is the lar ...
in Honolulu.
Dunham then had a career in rural development, championing women's work and microcredit
:''This article is specific to small loans, often provided in a pooled manner. For direct payments to individuals for specific projects, see Micropatronage. For financial services to the poor, see Microfinance. For small payments, see Micropayme ...
for the world's poor and worked with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women's rights, and grass-roots development.
In March 1977, Dunham, under the supervision of agricultural economics professor Leon A. Mears, developed and taught a short lecture course at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia (FEUI) in Jakarta for staff members of BAPPENAS
The Ministry of National Development Planning/National Development Planning Agency ( id, Kementerian Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional/Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional) (abbreviated PPN/Bappenas) is a ministry of the Republic of Indonesia t ...
(Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional)—the Indonesian National Development Planning Agency.
From June 1977 through September 1978, Dunham carried out research on village industries in the Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY)—the Yogyakarta Special Region within Central Java
Central Java ( id, Jawa Tengah) is a province of Indonesia, located in the middle of the island of Java. Its administrative capital is Semarang. It is bordered by West Java in the west, the Indian Ocean and the Special Region of Yogyakarta in t ...
in Indonesia under a student grant from the East–West Center. As a weaver
Weaver or Weavers may refer to:
Activities
* A person who engages in weaving fabric
Animals
* Various birds of the family Ploceidae
* Crevice weaver spider family
* Orb-weaver spider family
* Weever (or weever-fish)
Arts and entertainment
...
herself, Dunham was interested in village industries, and moved to Yogyakarta City, the center of Javanese handicrafts.
In May and June 1978, Dunham was a short-term consultant in the office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Jakarta, writing recommendations on village industries and other non-agricultural enterprises for the Indonesian government's third five-year development plan (REPELITA III).
From October 1978 to December 1980, Dunham was a rural industries consultant in Central Java on the Indonesian Ministry of Industry's Provincial Development Program (PDP I), funded by USAID in Jakarta and implemented through Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI).
From January 1981 to November 1984, Dunham was the program officer for women and employment in the Ford Foundation's Southeast Asia regional office in Jakarta. While at the Ford Foundation, she developed a model of microfinance
Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings ...
which is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that is a world leader in micro-credit systems. Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
The United States secretary of the treasury is the head of the United States Department of the Treasury, and is the chief financial officer of the federal government of the United States. The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal a ...
in her son's administration), was head of the foundation's Asia grant-making at that time.
From May to November 1986 and from August to November 1987, Dunham was a cottage industries development consultant for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan
The Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited (ZTBL) ( ur, ), formerly known as Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan, is Pakistani government-owned agricultural development bank which is based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Founded in 1961 as the agricultura ...
(ADBP) under the Gujranwala Integrated Rural Development Project (GADP). The credit component of the project was implemented in the Gujranwala
Gujranwala ( ur, , label=none; ) is a city and capital of Gujranwala Division located in Pakistan. It is also known as "City of Wrestlers" and is quite famous for its food. It is the 5th most populous city proper after Karachi, Lahore, Faisala ...
district of the Punjab province of Pakistan with funding from the Asian Development Bank and IFAD, with the credit component implemented through Louis Berger International, Inc. Dunham worked closely with the Lahore office of the Punjab Small Industries Corporation (PSIC).
From January 1988 to 1995, Dunham was a consultant and research coordinator for Indonesia's oldest bank, Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) in Jakarta, with her work funded by USAID and the World Bank. In March 1993, Dunham was a research and policy coordinator for Women's World Banking (WWB) in New York. She helped WWB manage the Expert Group Meeting on Women and Finance in New York in January 1994, and helped the WWB take prominent roles in the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women held September 4–15, 1995 in Beijing, and in the UN regional conferences and NGO forums that preceded it.
On August 9, 1992, she was awarded PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice G. Dewey
Alice Greeley Dewey (December 4, 1928 – June 11, 2017) was an American anthropologist who studied Javanese society. She was a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 1962 until her retirement in 2005. Among her do ...
, with a 1,043-page dissertation titled ''Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.'' Anthropologist Michael Dove described the dissertation as "a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry". According to Dove, Dunham's dissertation challenged popular perceptions regarding economically and politically marginalized groups, and countered the notions that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West. According to Dove, Dunham
found that the villagers she studied in Central Java had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were "keenly interested in profits", she wrote, and entrepreneurship was "in plentiful supply in rural Indonesia", having been "part of the traditional culture" there for a millennium.
Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, "many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials", who then used the money to strengthen their own status further.
Dunham produced a large amount of professional papers that are held in collections of the National Anthropological Archives (NAA). Her daughter donated a collection of them that is categorized as the ''S. Ann Dunham papers, 1965-2013''. This collection contains case studies, correspondence, field notebooks, lectures, photographs, reports, research files, research proposals, surveys, and floppy disks documenting her dissertation research on blacksmithing, as well as her professional work as a consultant for organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the Bank Raykat Indonesia (BRI). They are housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Her field notes have been digitized and, in 2020, Smithsonian Magazine noted that an effort had been established for a project to transcribe them. Public participation in the transcription project was announced at the same time.
Illness and death
In late 1994, Dunham was living and working in Indonesia. One night, during dinner at a friend's house in Jakarta, she experienced stomach pain. A visit to a local physician led to an initial diagnosis of indigestion. Dunham returned to the United States in early 1995 and was examined at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and diagnosed with uterine cancer. By this time, the cancer had spread to her ovaries. She moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother and died on November 7, 1995, 22 days short of her 53rd birthday. Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Obama and his sister spread their mother's ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout on the south side of Oahu. Obama scattered the ashes of his grandmother Madelyn Dunham in the same spot on December 23, 2008, weeks after his election to the presidency.
Obama talked about Dunham's death in a 30-second campaign advertisement ("Mother") arguing for health care reform. The ad featured a photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama in her arms as Obama talks about her last days worrying about expensive medical bills.[ The topic also came up in a 2007 speech in Santa Barbara:][
]I remember my mother. She was 52 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn't thinking about getting well. She wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn't sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it's like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it's wrong. It's not who we are as a people.
Dunham's employer-provided health insurance covered most of the costs of her medical treatment, leaving her to pay the deductible and uncovered expenses, which came to several hundred dollars per month.[Scott (2011), pp. 328–336.]
Her employer-provided disability insurance denied her claims for uncovered expenses because the insurance company said her cancer was a preexisting condition.
Posthumous interest
In September 2008, the University of Hawaii at Mānoa held a symposium about Dunham. In December 2009, Duke University Press published a version of Dunham's dissertation titled ''Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.'' The book was revised and edited by Dunham's graduate advisor, Alice G. Dewey
Alice Greeley Dewey (December 4, 1928 – June 11, 2017) was an American anthropologist who studied Javanese society. She was a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 1962 until her retirement in 2005. Among her do ...
, and Nancy I. Cooper. Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, wrote the foreword for the book. In his afterword, Boston University anthropologist Robert W. Hefner describes Dunham's research as "prescient" and her legacy as "relevant today for anthropology, Indonesian studies, and engaged scholarship".[
:See also:
* ] The book was launched at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...
in Philadelphia with a special Presidential Panel on Dunham's work; The 2009 meeting was taped by C-SPAN
Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the United States ...
.
In 2009, an exhibition of Dunham's Javanese batik textile collection (''A Lady Found a Culture in its Cloth: Barack Obama's Mother and Indonesian Batiks'') toured six museums in the United States, finishing the tour at the Textile Museum A textile museum is a museum with exhibits relating to the history and art of textiles, including:
* Textile industries and manufacturing, often located in former factories or buildings involved in the design and production of yarn, cloth and c ...
of Washington, D.C., in August. Early in her life, Dunham explored her interest in the textile arts as a weaver, creating wall hangings for her own enjoyment. After moving to Indonesia, she was attracted to the striking textile art of the batik and began to collect a variety of different fabrics.
In December 2010 Dunham was awarded the Bintang Jasa Utama, Indonesia's highest civilian award; the Bintang Jasa is awarded at three levels, and is presented to those individuals who have made notable civic and cultural contributions.
A lengthy major biography of Dunham by former '' New York Times'' reporter Janny Scott, titled ''A Singular Woman'', was published in 2011.
The University of Hawaii Foundation has established the Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment, which supports a faculty position housed in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and the Ann Dunham Soetoro Graduate Fellowships, providing funding for students associated with the East–West Center (EWC) in Honolulu, Hawaii.
In 2010 the Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship was established for young women graduating from Mercer Island High School, Ann's alma mater. In its first six years the scholarship fund has awarded eleven college scholarships.
On January 1, 2012, President Obama and his family visited an exhibition of his mother's anthropological work on display at the East–West Center.
Filmmaker Vivian Norris's feature length biographical film of Ann Dunham entitled ''Obama Mama
''Obama Mama'' is a 2014 biographic documentary film about Ann Dunham by producer/director Vivian Norris. It was co-produced with Brian Woods. The film was a featured selection at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), where it pr ...
'' (La mère d'Obama-French title) premiered on May 31, 2014, as part of the 40th annual Seattle International Film Festival, not far from where Dunham grew up on Mercer Island.
Personal beliefs
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 ndonesiawhere fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship ... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism
Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system or life stance that embraces human reason, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality an ...
, a soldier for New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
, 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:
Dunham's best friend in high school, Maxine Box, said that Dunham "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." On the other hand, Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked later 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 a 2007 speech, Obama contrasted the beliefs of his mother to those of her parents, and commented on her spirituality and skepticism: "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."
Obama also described his own beliefs in relation to the religious upbringing of his mother and father:
Publications
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
References
*
*
*
Further reading
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dunham, Ann
Obama family
American women anthropologists
American women social scientists
American feminists
American humanists
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumni
University of Washington alumni
People from Honolulu
People from Mercer Island, Washington
People from Wichita, Kansas
American people of English descent
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Scottish descent
American people of Swiss descent
American people of Welsh descent
American expatriates in Indonesia
American expatriates in Pakistan
Deaths from cancer in Hawaii
Deaths from uterine cancer
Mothers of presidents of the United States
1942 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American women scientists
20th-century American scientists
Mercer Island High School alumni
20th-century American anthropologists
American people of African descent