Two Progressive Lives: Hillary Clinton and Ann Dunham

One of the least explored areas of research in the narrative study of lives is the confluence between psychobiography and the spread of globalization. In this brief essay, I examine the life narrative of Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and the presumptive Democratic 2016 nominee, and Ann Dunham, President Obama’s late mother, to suggest that narrative analysis with a cross-cultural perspective can be a fruitful area of inquiry for life history studies.

Political commentators, legal scholars, and psychologists all agree that Obama personifies the role of “the good black man,” “a non-challenging bargainer” as opposed to the “threatening black man” in the American psyche (Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, 2008). Many of these scholars also claim that Obama cleverly deployed his conciliatory, listening, feminized, and empathic personality to attract white American voters, including a majority of the women voters (Dinesh Sharma, Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia, 2011).

In the first presidential and primary campaigns, Obama played down direct confrontation with his Republican counterpart John McCain and his female competitors Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. In the re-election campaign, he avoided direct confrontation with Mitt Romney during the debates. Invariably, presenting a gentler black male persona of the professor—the Sidney Poitier-like

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image his mother always admired—he persuaded the American public.

Men’s psychology suggests that a man’s feminine side is partly a composite, or a gestalt, of the long-term interactions with the important women in his life. Barack Obama, of course, was raised by several strong women who sent him on his path-breaking journey, as I have argued in Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia. The women who shaped Obama’s life have been principally three, namely his mother Ann Dunham, grandmother Madelyn Dunham, and wife Michelle Robinson. The struggles of these three women have molded Obama’s self and identity, and symbolically guided his actions on a daily basis.

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that this pattern has worked in the White House, where some of his most trusted advisors—from Valerie Jarrett in the White House, Hillary Clinton as the former Secretary of State, Nancy Pelosi in Congress, Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano as the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Susan Rice at the U.N.—are strong women leaders. Obama’s two Supreme Court appointments, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are women. Recently, the role of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission was appointed to a leading female lawyer, Mary Jo White, former district attorney of the Southern District of New York, and the General Counsel’s appointment to Anne K. Small, a White House counsel.

Given Obama’s father’s absence, his relationship with important surrogate father-figures—his grandfather, his Indonesian stepfather, literary mentors like Frank Marshall Davis, and his pastor Reverend Wright—have invariably been marked by disappointment. These men, by Obama’s own account, have never fully measured up to the idealized image of his biological father lodged in his heart and mind. Thus, the women in Obama’s inner world have by far had the strongest influence on shaping his destiny.

The three key women in Obama’s personal narrative hail from the Midwest. Thus, Obama established his roots in the Midwest and displays the American traits that he is now well-known for—progressive idealism, pragmatism, and a steely determination. While Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father (2004), is principally concerned with the loss of a father and his personality before he became a politician, his later book, The Audacity of Hope

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(2006), is dedicated to the key women in his life. It is an overtly political book focused on the fundamentals of the American dream and the Midwestern values of hard work and responsibility he acquired from his mother and grandmother.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, who by all accounts was the first anthropologist mother of an American president, was a passionate supporter of women’s education and literacy development. She had conducted many projects, which raised women’s status in the developing world, especially in Southeast Asia, where for almost 20 years she did her dissertation research (Stanley Ann Dunham, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, 2009). The President as a young boy had travelled with her on many occasions to villages in Indonesia.

As Elizabeth Moore revealed in her Newsday article “Obama’s mother, Hillary Clinton shared a belief in micro-lending” in 2008, and Jenny Scott has fully reported in her book A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2012), starting in 1993 to the end of 1994, Ann Dunham was working in New York City, preparing for a major United Nations (U.N.) conference in Beijing, where she planned to speak about microcredits and micro-lending to poor women. This is the same conference where Hillary Clinton, then first lady, electrified the audience with her now well-known statement, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights…” (Patrick Tyler, “Hillary Clinton, in China, Details Abuse of Women,” 1995).

While Ann Dunham’s colleagues wondered what impact she might have had at the Beijing conference, she never made it to the event, suffering from the last stages of cancer in Hawaii. However, Clinton spoke at the panel co-sponsored by the International Coalition on Women and Credit that Ann Dunham had brought together at the U.N.’s initiative. Later, Clinton helped launch a campaign to extend microfinance to 100 million families, a goal the coalition pushed in Beijing.

Historians might speculate what it meant to pick Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State after a bitterly fought campaign, but there is no doubt it had a personal meaning as well for the President. His mother and Hillary Clinton were “generational sisters” of sorts, separated only by five years (Hillary being younger), both Midwesterners by birth and socialization, both ardent feminists who supported and championed women’s liberation, and both travelled

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the world empowering women and girls. See Table 1 for a comparison between these two remarkable women.

Table 1: A Biographical Comparison of Ann Dunham and Hillary Clinton

Some of Ann Dunham’s friends also noted the parallel: “I remember us saying it’s such a shame that this is getting unpleasant, because they actually have this connection – they are one degree separated from one another,” recalled a development expert who worked with Obama’s mother (Moore, 2008). Ann Dunham’s colleagues in New York knew she was a pioneer, but they did not know that her work would gain yet another level of prominence because her son would go on to become president someday. They knew that she did research and developed the field standards that

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guided the program expansion. Her work made it possible for development agencies to not cast women as passive victims, so lending money to them could be seen as a viable idea. Nancy Barry, the former president of Women’s World Banking and an early micro-lender who hired her, has said that Ann Dunham’s work unified us around a common theme, women’s economic empowerment.

Friends remember Ann Dunham as an earthy person, grounded in real-life experiences, but a woman with a larger-than-life passion for making a difference in the world. She wrote a 1,000-page doctoral thesis on village economy in Indonesia, the insights from which were used to design savings and credit products for millions of low-income rural clients at the People’s Bank of Indonesia. She convinced bankers to see how reliable small-scale women entrepreneurs can be in borrowing, building, and expanding a business.

Ann Dunham wanted to move families out of poverty while she was looking to achieve a sea change in the way women are perceived in the developing world, reports Nina Nayar, one of Dunham’s close friends and colleagues (Moore, 2008). She worked on an effort to convince the U.N. to convene an expert panel on lending to women with a survey on points of agreement they shared. The report from the experts became the foundation for the Beijing policy platform and for standards on lending that emerged later. Nicola Armacost, a development expert, said, “We sent it to every finance minister in the world, and every central bank governor…. We were a very small organization and we were really trying to leverage the resources we had as effectively as we could. Beijing was a huge opportunity for us to put microcredit on the map” (Moore, 2008).

The professional efforts made by Ann Dunham were in a separate but parallel track with the initiatives made by the Arkansas first lady, Hillary Clinton, who launched a project backed by Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh. Both women viewed the Beijing conference as an opportunity to further microcredit projects. Microcredit was mentioned in probably every other speech she made as first lady, according to Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff (Moore, 2008).

At the conference, Clinton chaired the panel and gave a passionate speech. “It’s called micro, but its impact on people is gigantic…. When we help these women to sow, we all reap,” Clinton

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told the audience (Hillary Clinton, “Remarks to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” 1995). While Clinton may not have heard of Ann Dunham’s work, she was influenced by it.

According to Lawrence Yanovitch at the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), who also worked with Ann Dunham, Hillary Clinton and the mother of the president had the same values (Moore, 2008). The confluence of their professional interests is self-evident. Ann Dunham’s legacy has been carried on, in effect, through the work of the next generation of women, Hillary Clinton being one of the foremost proponents of the same set of causes. When the President chose her as the Secretary of State, he was bound to improve the U.S. image abroad and continue the legacy of the causes his mother had worked for all her professional life.

When Hillary Clinton receives the democratic nomination in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, the political and psychological rite de passage would be complete, ushering in the landmark historical transition from the first black president to potentially the first woman president, with a multi-generational legacy stretching back to Obama’s mother’s progressive journey. As a crowning achievement, a woman president would fulfill “the dreams from his mother,” advancing women’s equality and rights worldwide.

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