Stanley Ann Dunham
From Philosopedia
Stanley Ann Dunham (29 November 1942 - 7 November 1995)
Dunham, the mother of Barack Obama, was born in Wichita, Kansas, to Stanley (an itinerant furniture salesman in Seattle) and Madelyn (who worked in a bank) Dunham. When 13, she moved to Mercer Island in 1956 in order that she could attend the town's just-opened high school.
At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, she studied anthropology.
Tim Jones, writing in the Chicago Tribune, described how she was not just a girl from Kansas but had married Barack Obama Sr. in 1960 against both their parents' disapproval, the Obama family's disapproval being that they "didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman."
In 1965, the two divorced when he went to Harvard to earn his Ph. D. in Economics, after which her husband returned to Kenya, worked for the government, and in 1982 was killed in an automobile accident.
Jones cites a description of Ann (the name she preferred - her father had wanted a boy) by her best friend in high school:
- "She was not a standard-issue girl of her times. ... She wasn't part of the matched-sweater-set crowd," said [Chip] Wall, a classmate and retired philosophy teacher who used to make after-school runs to Seattle with Dunham to sit and talk - for hours and hours - in coffee shops."
- "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't."
In 1967 when her son Barack was five, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager, moving with him to Jakarta, Indonesia. In Hawaiian, Lolo means "crazy." They were divorced in the late 1970s and he died of a liver ailment in 1987. Of him, Barack Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father,
- With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). . . .LIke many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.
In 1992 she earned her Ph. D. in Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, writing on the subject, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds."
Death of a Humanities Humanist
Her death in 1995 was from ovarian and uterine cancer.
Scott Fornek, referring to a re-release of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father (2004), wrote:
- "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," he wrote.
- Stanley Ann was a cultural anthropologist. Obama described her as "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."
- Her mother, Madelyn Dunham, has said that Stanley Ann considered herself "an Adlai Stevenson liberal."
- Obama and his mother were always close - "extraordinarily so, I would say," Madelyn Dunham said in a 2004 interview. "They understood one another."
- Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng has described their mother as "a great romantic."
- "She travelled all over the world and would only see the good in each place that she went," Soetoro-Ng said in 2004, adding that her half-brother's book captured "both her eternal hopefulness and her sense of adventure, her fun-loving spirit, but also her naivete at times."
