Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995) was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia who is best known for being the mother of US President Barack Obama. Born in Wichita, Kansas, she studied at the East–West Center and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts (1967), a Master of Arts (1974), and a PhD (1992) in anthropology.
Drawing on her interest in craftsmanship, weaving, and the role of women in cottage industries, Dunham conducted research on women's work on the island of Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she designed microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development. In Jakarta, she worked for the Ford Foundation, and consulted for the Asian Development Bank in Pakistan. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.
Because she was the mother of Barack Obama, her anthropological research was the subject of renewed interest after his 2008 election to the presidency, with new symposiums, endowments, fellowships, exhibitions, and publications dedicated to reexamining her life and upholding her legacy.
Early life Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, the only child of Madelyn Lee Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham. She was of predominantly English ancestry, with small amounts of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German and Swiss-German. Ancestry.com claimed on July 30, 2012, after using a combination of old documents and yDNA analysis, that Dunham's mother was descended from John Punch, an African slave in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia.
Her parents were born in Kansas and married on May 5, 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the United States Army, and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita. According to Dunham, she was named after her father because he wanted a son, though her relatives doubt this story. Her maternal uncle recalled that her mother named Dunham after her favorite actress Bette Davis' character (Stanley Timberlake) in the film In This Our Life because she thought Stanley, as a girl's name, sounded sophisticated. As a child and teenager, she was known as Stanley. Other children teased her about her name. Nonetheless, she used it through high school, "apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town." By the time Dunham began attending college, she was known by her middle name, Ann, instead.
After World War II, Dunham's family moved from Wichita to California while her father attended the University of California, Berkeley. In 1948, they moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, and from there to Vernon, Texas, and then to El Dorado, Kansas.Jones 2007. See also: Also: In 1955, the family moved to Seattle, Washington, where her father was employed as a furniture salesman and her mother worked as vice president of a bank. They lived in an apartment complex in the Wedgwood neighborhood where she attended Nathan Eckstein Junior High School.
In 1957, Dunham's family moved to Mercer Island, an Eastside suburb of Seattle. Dunham's parents wanted their daughter to attend the newly opened Mercer Island High School. At the school, teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging social norms and questioning authority to the young Dunham, and she took the lessons to heart: "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." One classmate remembered her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way", and a high school friend described her as knowledgeable and progressive: "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 called her "the original feminist". She went through high school "reading beatnik poets and French existentialists".Obama, Barack (2020) A Promised Land. Crown. page 15.
Family life and marriages
On August 21, 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state to be admitted into the Union. Dunham's parents sought business opportunities in the new state, and after graduating from high school in 1960, Dunham and her family moved to Honolulu. Dunham enrolled at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.Mendell (2007), page 27.
First marriage While attending a Russian language class, Dunham met Barack Obama Sr., the school's first African student. Dunham and Obama Sr. were married on the Hawaiian island of Maui on February 2, 1961, despite parental opposition from both families. (online) ("Special Democratic Convention issue") (print) Dunham was three months pregnant. Obama Sr. eventually informed Dunham about his first marriage in Kenya but claimed he was divorced. Years later she discovered this was false. Obama Sr.'s first wife, Kezia, later said she had granted her consent for him to marry a second wife in keeping with Luo customs.
On August 4, 1961, at the age of 18, Dunham gave birth to her first child, Barack Obama, in Honolulu. Friends in the state of Washington recall her visiting with her month-old baby in 1961. Susan Blake [Botkin] (Stanley Ann Dunham's high school classmate) She studied at the University of Washington from September 1961 to June 1962, and lived as a single mother in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle with her son while her husband continued his studies in Hawaii. Both Anna Obama and Joseph Toutonghi were listed as residing at the same address, in the Seattle Reverse Directory, 1961–1962. See: When Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi in June 1962, he left for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he began graduate study at Harvard University in fall 1962. Dunham returned to Honolulu and resumed her undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii with the spring semester in January 1963. During this time, her parents helped her raise her child. Dunham filed for divorce in January 1964 and Obama Sr. did not contest.
Second marriage At the East–West Center, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese Reprinted by: surveyor who came to Honolulu in September 1962. In 1965, Soetoro and Dunham were married in Hawaii, and in 1966, Soetoro returned to Indonesia. Dunham graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi with a B.A. in anthropology on August 6, 1967, and moved in October the same year with her son to Jakarta, Indonesia, to rejoin her husband.
The family first lived in a newly built neighborhood in the Menteng Dalam administrative village of the Tebet subdistrict in South Jakarta for two and a half years. In 1970 they moved to the Matraman Dalam neighborhood in the Pegangsaan administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta. On August 15, 1970, Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro. Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, she sent Obama back to Hawaii to attend Punahou School. In August 1972, Dunham and her daughter moved back to Hawaii so Dunham could begin graduate study in anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dunham's graduate work was supported by an Asia Foundation grant from August 1972 to July 1973 and by an East–West Center Technology and Development Institute grant from August 1973 to December 1978.
Dunham completed her coursework at the University of Hawaiʻi for an M.A. in anthropology in December 1974. She spent three years in Hawaii, then returned to Indonesia in 1975 with her daughter to do anthropological field work. Lolo Soetoro and Dunham divorced on November 5, 1980; Lolo Soetoro married Erna Kustina in 1980 and had two children, a son, Yusuf Aji Soetoro (born 1981), and daughter, Rahayu Nurmaida Soetoro (born 1987). Dunham was not estranged from either ex-husband and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers.
Professional life Early career (1968–1975) Dunham taught English in Central Jakarta from 1968 to 1972. She was also assistant director of the Indonesia-America Friendship Institute and later a department head and director of the Institute of Management Education and Development. During this same time, Dunham co-founded the Ganesha Volunteers (Indonesian Heritage Society) at the National Museum in Jakarta. She was also a crafts instructor in weaving, batik, and dye at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu from 1972 to 1975.
Development (1977–1984) She worked in rural development, championing women's work and microcredit for the world's poor with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women's rights, and grass-roots development. In March 1977, under the supervision of agricultural economics professor Leon A. Mears, she developed and taught a short lecture course at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia (FEUI) in Jakarta for staff members of the Indonesian National Development Planning Agency.
She was a short-term consultant in the office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Jakarta, writing recommendations on village industries and other non-agricultural enterprises for the Indonesian government's third five-year development plan (REPELITA III) between May and June 1978. Dunham worked as a rural industries consultant in Central Java on the Indonesian Ministry of Industry's Provincial Development Program (PDP I) from October 1978 to December 1980. The program was funded by the United States Agency for International Development and implemented through Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI).
Dunham was the program officer for women and employment in the Ford Foundation's Southeast Asia regional office in Jakarta from January 1981 to November 1984. While at the Ford Foundation, she developed a model of microfinance which is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that is a world leader in micro-credit systems. Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in her son's administration), was head of the foundation's Asia grant-making at that time.
International consulting (1986–1995) From May to November 1986 and from August to November 1987, Dunham was a cottage industries development consultant for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP) under the Gujranwala Integrated Rural Development Project (GADP). The credit component of the project was implemented in the Gujranwala district of the Punjab province of Pakistan with funding from the Asian Development Bank and International Fund for Agricultural Development, with the credit component implemented through Louis Berger International, Inc. Dunham worked closely with the Lahore office of the Punjab Small Industries Corporation (PSIC).
From January 1988 to 1995, Dunham was a consultant and research coordinator for Indonesia's oldest bank, Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) in Jakarta, with her work funded by USAID and the World Bank. In March 1993, Dunham was a research and policy coordinator for Women's World Banking (WWB) in New York. She helped WWB manage the Expert Group Meeting on Women and Finance in New York in January 1994, and helped the WWB take prominent roles in the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women held September 4–15, 1995 in Beijing, and in the UN regional conferences and NGO forums that preceded it.
Academic research Dunham carried out research on village industries in the Yogyakarta Special Region within Central Java in Indonesia under a student grant from the East–West Center from June 1977 through September 1978. As a weaver herself, Dunham was interested in village industries, and moved to Yogyakarta City, the center of Javanese handicrafts.