Ann Dunham

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Stanley Ann Dunham grew up answering to a name that other children found funny. She kept using it through high school, "apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town." By the time she reached college, she was going by her middle name, Ann. That quiet act of self-definition suited the woman she became. Dunham was an American anthropologist who studied the economic life of Indonesian villages. She was also the mother of Barack Obama, a former President of the United States. This documentary asks how a girl from Kansas ended up designing small loans for rural families on the other side of the world. It asks what her research actually argued about poverty, and what kind of marriages and moves shaped her days. And it asks why universities, museums and filmmakers kept returning to her work after she was gone.

  565228

• 2. A Restless Childhood

  ›

  Dunham was born in Wichita, Kansas, on the 29th of November 1942. She was the only child of Madelyn Lee Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham. Her first name came with two competing explanations. Dunham herself said her father wanted a son, although her relatives doubt that story. Her maternal uncle remembered it differently. In his telling, her mother loved the actress Bette Davis and borrowed the name Stanley from a character in the film In This Our Life. She thought it sounded sophisticated for a girl.

  Her parents had both been born in Kansas, and they married in Wichita on the 5th of May 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the United States Army. Her mother took a job at a Boeing plant in Wichita. Dunham's ancestry was predominantly English, with small amounts of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German and Swiss-German. On the 30th of July 2012, Ancestry.com claimed that her mother descended from John Punch, an African slave in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia.

  After World War II, the family moved to California so her father could attend the University of California, Berkeley. In 1948 they relocated to Ponca City, Oklahoma. From there they went to Vernon, Texas, and then to El Dorado, Kansas. In 1955 they settled in Seattle, Washington. Her father worked as a furniture salesman, and her mother became vice president of a bank. Dunham attended Nathan Eckstein Junior High School while the family lived in an apartment complex in the Wedgwood neighborhood.

  In 1957 the family moved again, this time to Mercer Island, an Eastside suburb of Seattle. Her parents wanted her to attend the newly opened Mercer Island High School. There, two teachers named Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman pressed her to challenge social norms and question authority. She took the lessons to heart. According to the account preserved in the record, "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children."

  Classmates remembered an unusual teenager. One called her "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way." A friend said, "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 simply called her "the original feminist." Her reading list at the time ran to beatnik poets and French existentialists.

  78151656

• 3. Marriages Across Oceans

  ›

  On the 21st of August 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state of the Union, and Dunham's parents went looking for business opportunities there. After she graduated from high school in 1960, the family moved to Honolulu. Dunham enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In a Russian language class she met Barack Obama Sr., the school's first African student.

  They married on the island of Maui on the 2nd of February 1961, despite opposition from both families. Dunham was three months pregnant. Obama Sr. eventually told her about a first marriage in Kenya, but claimed he was divorced. Years later she learned that was false. His first wife, Kezia, later said she had consented to a second wife in keeping with Luo customs.

  On the 4th of August 1961, at the age of 18, Dunham gave birth to her son in Honolulu. From September 1961 to June 1962 she studied at the University of Washington. She lived as a single mother in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood while her husband continued his studies in Hawaii. When Obama Sr. left for graduate study at Harvard University in the fall of 1962, Dunham went back to Honolulu. She resumed her undergraduate work in January 1963, with her parents helping to raise the child. She filed for divorce in January 1964, and he did not contest it.

  At the East-West Center, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese surveyor who had arrived in Honolulu in September 1962. They married in Hawaii in 1965, and Soetoro returned to Indonesia the following year. On the 6th of August 1967, Dunham received her bachelor's degree in anthropology. In October of that year she followed her husband to Jakarta with her son.

  The family spent two and a half years in a newly built neighborhood in South Jakarta. In 1970 they moved to the Matraman Dalam neighborhood in Central Jakarta. On the 15th of August 1970, Dunham gave birth to a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro. At home, Dunham supplemented her son's schooling with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971 she sent him back to Hawaii to attend Punahou School.

  In August 1972, Dunham and her daughter returned to Hawaii so she could begin graduate study in anthropology. An Asia Foundation grant supported her from August 1972 to July 1973. A grant from the East-West Center Technology and Development Institute then ran from August 1973 to December 1978. She completed her master's coursework in December 1974. In 1975 she went back to Indonesia with her daughter to do field work.

  Lolo Soetoro and Dunham divorced on the 5th of November 1980. That same year Soetoro married Erna Kustina, and the couple had a son, Yusuf Aji, in 1981 and a daughter, Rahayu Nurmaida, in 1987. Dunham stayed on good terms with both of her ex-husbands. She encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers.

  1013181756

• 4. Development Work

  ›

  From 1968 to 1972, Dunham taught English in Central Jakarta. She also served as assistant director of the Indonesia-America Friendship Institute. Later she became a department head and then director of the Institute of Management Education and Development. During those years she co-founded the Ganesha Volunteers, also known as the Indonesian Heritage Society, at the National Museum in Jakarta. Back in Honolulu from 1972 to 1975, she taught weaving, batik and dye work as a crafts instructor at the Bishop Museum.

  In March 1977, Dunham developed and taught a short lecture course at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. Professor Leon A. Mears, an agricultural economist, supervised her. Her students were staff members of the Indonesian National Development Planning Agency. In May and June 1978 she worked as a short-term consultant for the International Labour Organization in Jakarta. Her task was to write recommendations on village industries for the government's third five-year development plan, known as REPELITA III.

  From October 1978 to December 1980, Dunham worked as a rural industries consultant in Central Java. The job was part of the Indonesian Ministry of Industry's Provincial Development Program. The United States Agency for International Development funded it, and Development Alternatives, Inc. implemented it.

  The Ford Foundation's Southeast Asia regional office in Jakarta hired her in January 1981 as program officer for women and employment. She stayed until November 1984. There she developed a model of microfinance that is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that leads the world in micro-credit systems. Peter Geithner, head of the foundation's Asia grant-making at the time, was the father of Tim Geithner. Tim Geithner later became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in her son's administration.

  In Pakistan, from May to November 1986 and again from August to November 1987, Dunham was a cottage industries development consultant. She worked for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan on the Gujranwala Integrated Rural Development Project. The credit component operated in the Gujranwala district of Punjab province, with funding from the Asian Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Louis Berger International carried it out, and Dunham worked closely with the Lahore office of the Punjab Small Industries Corporation.

  From January 1988 to 1995, Dunham served as consultant and research coordinator for Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the country's oldest bank. Her work was funded by USAID and the World Bank. At that bank she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.

  In March 1993, she became research and policy coordinator for Women's World Banking in New York. She helped the organization run its Expert Group Meeting on Women and Finance there in January 1994. She also helped it take prominent roles in the regional conferences and NGO forums that led up to the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing from the 4th to the 15th of September 1995.

  3031322256

• 5. The Blacksmith Dissertation

  ›

  From June 1977 through September 1978, a student grant from the East-West Center paid for Dunham's research on village industries in the Yogyakarta Special Region of Central Java. She was a weaver herself, and that interest drew her to crafts. She moved to Yogyakarta City, the center of Javanese handicrafts.

  On the 9th of August 1992, the University of Hawaii awarded her a PhD in anthropology. Her dissertation ran to 1,043 pages, and Alice G. Dewey supervised it. Its title was Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving against all odds. Anthropologist Michael Dove described it as "a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry."

  Dove argued that the dissertation challenged popular perceptions of economically and politically marginalized groups. It countered the notion that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves. It also rejected the idea that cultural differences explain the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West.

  In December 2009, Duke University Press published a new version of the dissertation as a book. Dewey, her former advisor, and Nancy I. Cooper revised and edited it. Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, wrote the foreword. Boston University anthropologist Robert W. Hefner called her research "prescient" in his afterword. He described her legacy as "relevant today for anthropology, Indonesian studies, and engaged scholarship." The book was launched at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, with a special Presidential Panel on her work. C-SPAN taped the meeting.

  Dunham left behind a large body of professional papers, now held by the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Her daughter donated the collection, which is cataloged as the S. Ann Dunham papers, 1965-2013. It holds case studies, correspondence, field notebooks, lectures, photographs, reports, surveys and research proposals. It documents both the blacksmithing research and her consulting for groups such as the Ford Foundation and Bank Rakyat Indonesia. Her field notes have been digitized, and in 2020 Smithsonian Magazine noted a project to transcribe them. The collection even includes floppy disks.

  3231253335

• 6. Faith and Doubt

  ›

  In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama described his mother as "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, he wrote that he was not raised in a religious household. He said her memories of the Christians in her youth were not fond ones. Yet he also called her "the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known." In his account, religion for her was one way among many, and not necessarily the best, that people tried to control the unknowable.

  Maxine Box, Dunham's best friend in high school, recalled that Dunham openly called herself an atheist. Box said she engaged with the subject well before her peers did.

  Dunham's daughter remembered it differently. Asked whether her mother was an atheist, Maya Soetoro-Ng said, "I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic." She added that Jesus, in her mother's view, "was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."

  In a 2007 speech, Obama set his mother's beliefs beside those of her parents. He described them as coming from a Baptist and Methodist background in a culture that was nonobservant and skeptical of organized religion. Obama identifies as a Christian. His own father came from a Kenyan Muslim family but was not religious and did not practice Islam.

  According to Soetoro-Ng, her mother gave the children all the good books: the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads, Buddhist scripture and the Tao Te Ching. She wanted them to see that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.

  1042434529

• 7. Final Illness

  ›

  In late 1994, over dinner at a friend's house in Jakarta, Dunham felt sudden stomach pain. A local physician first diagnosed indigestion. She returned to the United States in early 1995 and was examined at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Doctors diagnosed uterine cancer, which had already spread to her ovaries.

  She moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother. Dunham died on the 7th of November 1995-22 days short of her 53rd birthday. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, her son and daughter spread her ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout, on the south side of Oahu. On the 23rd of December 2008, weeks after his election to the presidency, Obama scattered the ashes of his grandmother Madelyn Dunham in the same spot.

  Obama later made his mother's final months part of his political case. A 30-second campaign advertisement titled "Mother" argued for health care reform. It showed a photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama in her arms, while he spoke about her worrying over expensive medical bills in her last days. He had raised the topic earlier, in a 2007 speech in Santa Barbara.

  Her employer-provided health insurance covered most of her treatment. She still had to pay the deductible and uncovered expenses, which came to several hundred dollars per month. Her employer-provided disability insurance denied her claims for those expenses, because the insurance company said her cancer was a preexisting condition.

  3622373938

• 8. Legacy

  ›

  In September 2008, the University of Hawaii at Manoa held its first symposium about Dunham. After her son's election, her anthropological research drew renewed interest, and the university foundation established the Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment. It supports a faculty position in the Anthropology Department. The foundation also created the Ann Dunham Soetoro Graduate Fellowships, which fund students associated with the East-West Center. In 2010 her old school, Mercer Island High School, began offering the Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship. In 2012, President Obama and his family visited an exhibition of her anthropological work at the East-West Center.

  An exhibition of her Javanese batik collection toured six museums in the United States. Its title was A Lady Found a Culture in its Cloth: Barack Obama's Mother and Indonesian Batiks. The tour ended at the Textile Museum of Washington, D.C., in August 2009. Before Indonesia, Dunham had woven wall hangings for her own enjoyment. After moving there, she was drawn to the striking textile art of batik and began collecting fabrics of many kinds.

  In December 2010, Indonesia awarded her the Bintang Jasa Utama, its highest civilian award. The Bintang Jasa comes in three levels. It goes to people who have made notable civic and cultural contributions.

  Former New York Times reporter Janny Scott published a major biography, A Singular Woman, in 2011. Filmmaker Vivian Norris made a feature-length film about Dunham called Obama Mama. It premiered on the 31st of May 2014 at the 40th annual Seattle International Film Festival. That was not far from Mercer Island, where Dunham had once been the teenager known as Stanley.

  4647485154