A Singular Woman Tells The Story of Obama's Mother

By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on May 16, 2011 8:20PM

When New York Times reporter Janny Scott was reporting on President Obama’s campaign, she stumbled across the intriguing and untold story of Stanley Ann Dunham — Barack Obama’s mother. In 2008, Scott wrote an article about Dunham that she described as “long for a newspaper, but short for a life.” The response was so great that Scott was offered a chance to research Obama’s mother further and write a biography. A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother was released earlier this month, a result of two and a half years of research. Scott interviewed friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham, read correspondence and archives, and visited the places where Stanley Ann Dunham lived.

She’ll be in town tonight for an event for A Singular Woman and we were offered a few minutes to chat with her about the book. She talks about some of the surprising things she learned about Stanley Ann Dunham and why the president’s mother was such a remarkable woman.

Janny Scott will be at Barnes & Noble, 1441 W. Webster Ave., tonight, May 16, at 7 p.m. The event is free.

Chicagoist: Why do you think there’s more focus on Obama’s unpresent father than on his mother?

Janny Scott: Well I think that focus was established way back. When he was elected president of Harvard Law Review in 1990, there were a number of articles written about him. And he was beginning to tell the story that was told in his speech in 2004 Democratic National Convention and later in his campaign. That story became the center of Dreams from My Father, and the stories and the idea that was created. It’s always been central to his story, and why his mother had such a secondary role, I’m not sure, except that President Obama was trying to figure out his racial identity. I’m assuming it’s something he was trying to figure out.

C: Since you couldn’t interview Stanley Ann, you did a lot of interviews with her friends and family. But you say early on that one’s memory can be untrustworthy. How did you reconcile what to trust?

JS: I made that point because I think it’s an important caution for anyone undertaking a project like this. If there’s one thing you learn, it’s that people remember things differently and you can’t always trust them. It’s an occupational hazard in this line of work, and it’s not a reason not to do the work, but it’s about being as honest with your readers as possible, admitting that what you are saying is one person’s memory of something. But you can’t do a book like this without trusting people’s memories, so you try to get as much supporting evidence — finding dates, asking other people, documents.

I interviewed a lot of people, up to 200 people, and got a lot of archival evidence, and I tried to cross check a lot of things with written documentation or other sources.

C:What were some of the most surprising things you uncovered as you were researching this book?

JS: Over and over, she does things you would not expect from a “white woman from Kansas.” At 17, having never had a boyfriend and probably a virgin, she conceives a child and marries him at a time when nearly two dozen states had laws against interracial marriages. She flies to Indonesia with her 6-year-old son and sends him back alone at age 10 to get an American education. She goes to work in small village in Java doing research in handicraft industries and hangs out in villages where Western women were rarely seen and ends up specializing in peasant blacksmithing, which was traditionally practiced by men. She becomes a pioneer in a filed of micro-finance in the late ‘80s in what was the largest micro-finance program in the world.

C: Where do you think she got this drive to take unconventional moves and make bold choices?

JS: While we imagine this couple from small town Kansas would be pretty traditional, they would be pretty nontraditional themselves. Her father was always interested in seeing over the next horizon, and her mother had this adventure streak that you see in her daughter.

She then was raised as a child moving constantly, so she had this lifestyle up to the age of 14 where they moved half a dozen times. She was always the outside and developed an outside sensibility where she was always looking in, but with an analytic distance. She had a wry sense of humor and could observe situations and see things that other people didn’t even notice.

Part of it was inherent to her character, part of it came form the influence of her parents and part of it was how she was raised.

C: What struck you about Stanly Ann Dunham that made you think it was important to write more and dedicate more coverage to her story?

JS: Her story is so different. Over and over again, this women made choices that were out of sync with her time and the standards of that generation. She did unconventional things in her relatively short life. People were blown away by this thoroughly unconventional life about which they knew nothing, and it sheds light on the president, a person a lot of Americans admit that they don’t feel they don’t very well.