This is a special report by Dr. Meda Chesney-Lind, Women’s Studies Program, University of Hawaii

I have been wondering about Barack Obama’s mother ever since I heard that she graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a Ph.D. in anthropology. She came to UHM as an undergraduate and married Obama’s father shortly after meeting him in 1961 in a Russian class; she must have been an undergraduate, and even for Hawaii this inter-racial marriage would have been noteworthy. We overlapped years later when she returned to the UH campus to finish her Ph.D., although we never met.

Contrary to the rightwing screeds on the internet, nothing about Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro is text book. She was not a baby boomer, though her son (despite media spin) is. She was born in 1942 while her father, then in the military, served in Kansas. She died of ovarian and uterine cancer at the age of 52 in 1995 only three years after she received her Ph.D. from a department on campus that has not been an easy place for female graduate students (or faculty) to thrive.

Fortunately for Ann, she found Dr. Alice Dewey to chair her committee, and her dissertation. Dewey was Ann’s friend as well as her mentor, and she’s full of animated stories about Ann and her children “Barry” and Maya. Ann and Maya lived with her for a time, and she talks of Ann “coming and going” constantly which made it hard for her to do a conventional graduate degree. She also recalls that Ann was a terrific mother, noting she would wake Barack up at 4 in the morning to home school him, after having gotten up at 3am herself. Ann, she says was full of energy, and a meticulous researcher and scholar.

Dewey asserts that Ann was really a craftsperson herself, a weaver, and recalls that she may have minored in art. For that reason, she had outstanding rapport in Indonesia, since she was a crafter at heart. The title of her dissertation, for those interested is “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds.” Dewey contends that the dissertation is really the distillation of 16 years of fieldwork in Indonesia. She also notes that when Ann started talking to her committee she wanted to do 5 crafts and was persuaded to only study one..and that effort is close to 1000 pages long. Dewey also said that Ann wanted to publish parts of her dissertation and she has the papers that indicate what parts Soetoro thought would make a compelling book, which she hoped would be published in Indonesia..

Her early work on micro credit and her interest in women’s economic issues are also very impressive, as is the enormous amount that she traveled.

Dewey said it best, though, and this is high praise, when she said, “it was a loss to Indonesia” when she died.

Women’s Studies has asked Dr. Dewey to present her recollections of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro on Sept. 12th, at 12:30 pm as the first in the Fall, 2008, WS Colloquium Series [location to be announced].

For further information on Dunham Soetoro, see an excellent biography of her that appeared in the New York Times. The author, Janny Scott is apparently going to take a year off and write a book length biography, according to Dr. Dewey, whom she quotes extensively.