Stanley Ann Dunham
Who was Stanley Ann Dunham?
What impact did Stanley Ann Dunham have on Barack Obama’s life?
How did Stanley Ann Dunham contribute to rural communities in Indonesia?
Stanley Ann Dunham was a study in contrasts: A woman born with a man’s name in the middle of the 20th century, she would marry twice, divorce twice, raise her two biracial children as a single mother, and make decisions that would separate her from her son. Born in America’s heartland, she would live much of her life abroad, earning a doctorate in anthropology and doing research to help women in rural settings build sustainable lives for themselves and their families.
The son who called her “the biggest influence on my life” would become the 44th president of the United States, but she would not live to see it.
Early life
- Death date and place: November 7, 1995, in Hawaii, U.S.
- Education: University of Hawaii: B.A. in anthropology, 1967; master’s in anthropology, 1975; Ph.D. in anthropology, 1992.
- Family: Married and divorced Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.; married and divorced Lolo Soetoro. Mother to Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro-Ng.
- Quotation: “To Barack and Maya who seldom complained when their mother was in the field.” (In the dedication to her published dissertation, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia)
The only child of Stanley and Madelyn Payne Dunham, Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1942. She got her name because her father wanted a boy, and she grew up fending off the confusion and teasing that came with it. Her father was a furniture salesman, and the family moved a lot during her childhood, spending time in Kansas, Texas, California, and Washington state. Her mother became a banker and was the Bank of Hawaii’s first woman vice president.
Stanley Ann Dunham went to high school near Seattle, was a good student, and got accepted to the University of Chicago, but her father moved the family once again, this time to Hawaii, and she entered the University of Hawaii in 1960.
Marriage to Barack Obama, Sr.
One of the first people Ann Dunham (she had dropped the Stanley by this time) met at college was a charismatic Kenyan student, eight years her senior, named Barack Obama. They began dating, and by the time they married in February 1961, Dunham was three months pregnant with their son. Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961. Shortly thereafter, Dunham took her infant son and went back to Washington state to study. But by the end of 1962, she had returned to Hawaii. Her husband was not there to greet her, however, having left to get his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University. In 1964 Ann Dunham filed for a divorce from Barack Obama.
Life in Indonesia
Ann Dunham found herself the divorced single mother of a biracial child in early 1960s America. But she was undeterred. She relied on her parents to help care for young Barack while she continued her studies, graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1967, with a degree in anthropology. While there, she fell in love again, with Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. They married, and when he returned to Indonesia, she and her son followed him. In 1970 they had a daughter, Maya.
“My mother championed the cause of women’s welfare and helped pioneer the microloans that have helped lift millions out of poverty.” —U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, in 2009.
A year later when Barack won a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in Hawaii, Ann chose to stay in Indonesia to continue her graduate work. It was a decision that said much about how she valued education: both her son’s and hers. A year later, however, she and Maya were back in Hawaii, where she continued her studies for a master’s degree in anthropology. Soetoro came often for visits, but the marriage was doomed, and Ann Dunham filed for divorce in 1980. The end of the marriage did nothing to squelch Dunham’s love for Indonesia and its people. In the mid-1970s when she returned to do field work in Indonesia and to pursue a doctorate, the teenage Barack Obama declined to go back with his mother.
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Years later, Obama would recall that his mother’s decision to leave him as a 10-year-old in Hawaii with his grandparents had a profound influence on him. “When I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know,” he told Time magazine in 2008.
But it was during these years that Dunham did her most important work. She traveled with Maya to rural villages doing research for her doctorate, which she earned in 1992. But more importantly she connected with the people in those rural villages, becoming familiar with their textile and metalworking crafts and devising ways for them to turn their work into sustainable businesses.
Working with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ford Foundation, and Indonesia’s largest bank, Dunham played an instrumental role in the development of a significant microfinancing program to provide credit and banking services to artisans in rural villages. Well known in Indonesia, bankers and heads of corporations and organizations would be sure to visit her when they came to Jakarta.
Death and legacy
In the fall of 1994, while in Jakarta, Dunham complained of stomach issues. When she returned to Hawaii the next year, she was diagnosed with uterine and ovarian cancer. She died on November 7, 1995. She was 52 years old.
During the last months of his mother’s life, Barack Obama was working on his now-famous memoir Dreams From My Father, drafts of which Dunham read during her illness. She is barely mentioned in the book, and in the preface to the 2004 edition, Obama lamented that, saying:
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.