During her first marriage, to Barack Obama's father, she was Ann Obama. And after her second marriage she was Ann Soetoro. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in most states. Dunham was three months pregnant when the two tied the knot in a ceremony so discrete that her son never uncovered any records of the event, according to Scott's biography of Dunham, "A Singular Woman. By the time Obama was a year old, his father, Barack Obama Sr. By the time he was six, he had moved with his mother to Indonesia after she married Lolo Soetoro.
The couple had a daughter, Maya Soetoro, before they divorced in Dunham died a few weeks short of her 53rd birthday, of uterine and ovarian cancer, two years before her son was elected to the Illinois state senate. Her 1,page dissertation explored the indigenous craft of blacksmithing in Indonesia, a topic she had studied for more than 20 years.
She died two years after completing it. The elder Obama, subject of the president's first memoir, is flashier, but The New York Times ' Janny Scott argues Dunham might be the more interesting half of that short-lived couple.
Scott took two and a half years off from her newspaper job to research Dunham, conducting interviews in the process. Here are the most interesting details of Dunham and baby Obama's time overseas:. On what Jakarta was like when Dunham arrived in with 6-year-old "Barry" to rejoin her husband, Lolo Soetoro, who'd been called back to his homeland a year earlier as Indonesia was ravaged by civil war:.
Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities and sewers, all in one. Residents traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks.
Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. Deworming was de rigueur. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia in largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. On the casual racism that followed Obama everywhere in Indonesia:. Occasionally, she took Barry to work. After their baby was born, Dunham decided to go to Seattle with baby Barack to be around family, while Obama Sr.
As Scott wrote in A Singular Woman, " The president's mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In actuality though, according to Scott, she was not only an important, inspirational figure in her son's life, but also a teacher and a forward-thinking worker who helped with local development and "consulted on microfinance projects" in Indonesia.
There was a period in where she was working in what her boss described to me as 'community development in Java. The family then moved together to Jakarta, where she started working on what would eventually be an anthropology master's degree.
At the time, President Obama was just six years old, attending school in Jakarta and learning English while his mother worked. She also had another child with her second husband, Maya Soetoro-Ng, one of what he would later learn were several of his siblings.
After a few years, the young Barack ended up back in Hawaii to live with Dunham's parents while she continued working in Indonesia. She remained in her son's life, but as Scott wrote, their geographic separation likely took a toll on her emotionally.
Dunham's work has been praised extensively, and is now considered ahead of its time by many in the industry. According to the Independent , she spent three decades working in Indonesia for organizations like the Ford Foundation, the Asian Development Bank, and the U.
Agency for International Development. She specifically worked in microfinance, something that Indonesia still pioneers today, while also being an activist and supporter of citizen groups "opposed to the military dictatorship.
The Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship Fund noted that she also spent time in Pakistan doing microcredit loans for low-income women and craftspeople. Towards the end of her life, she lived in New York and was an employee of Women's World Banking, which focuses primarily on offering assistance to women.
President Obama was even once given a book of his mother's work while on a visit to the Philippines, per The Wall Street Journal. According to the Stanley Ann Dunham Fund's biography, she passed away of ovarian cancer in at age 52 in Hawaii.
President Obama has continued to speak about his mother and her extended family, who helped to raise him as a child, throughout his career. He recently shared a photo of himself and his mother with a tribute to her on Instagram.
For her, the world offered endless opportunities for moral instruction," Obama wrote.
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