A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  Kessinger also wanted someone interested in women. There was a new focus at Ford on gender equality and the status of women. In Indonesia, the position of women had been relatively high compared with what it was in some other Muslim and even non-Muslim countries. But population pressure and technological change were pushing rural women into menial work. The extent of the problem was difficult to gauge, because there had been few studies of village women. Members of the Ford staff in Jakarta had suggested hiring someone to spend half their time as a program officer based in Jakarta, developing and managing projects addressing the need for paying work for village women. The rest of the time, he or she would work as a so-called project specialist at the Bogor Agricultural Institute, helping Indonesian researchers analyze village-level data on women, and teaching younger scholars how to do field research. Sidney Jones, the only female program officer in the Jakarta office of Ford at the time, invited Ann and Tom Kessinger to dinner at her house. Not long after that, Kessinger hired Ann.

  “At first impression, you would say she was easygoing,” Kessinger told me. “Once you got to know her, she was really quite intense and, in a certain sense, driven.” She was serious and focused, and willing to engage with people. “But there was also a little bit of reserve as well, which I never totally figured out,” Kessinger said. “I could see that some people might see that as a kind of snobbishness—though I don’t mean snobbishness. When someone is distancing, sometimes it’s personality or they’re protecting themselves. Sometimes it’s read as not very open or warm. Ann had that quality. I felt it the first evening we had dinner at Sidney Jones’s house. I was doing the interview kind of thing—not the formal interview. I just had a sense that there were areas where I was going to get a certain distance, not further. There seemed to be a time when the conversation had to go in a different direction.”

  By January 1981, Ann was back in Jakarta with Maya and working for Ford.

  “Life in the bubble” is the phrase one longtime Ford employee used to describe life as a Ford program officer in Jakarta. The economy was growing, the oil industry was booming, and Jakarta was becoming a modern city, but Ford families lived in a style that resembled an earlier, colonial-era, expatriate existence. They were housed in Kebayoran Baru, a quiet neighborhood of wide, shaded streets planned by the Dutch, where Ford owned or leased a number of high-ceilinged bungalows with ceiling fans, verandas, and gardens dense with flowering trees. The foundation furnished the houses in teak and rattan or to the tastes of the Ford families. It dispatched its own maintenance crew to fix toilets that ceased to flush. Ann’s house was comfortable, not lavish. (“My oven has collapsed!” she wrote to a Ford support-staff member in April 1981. “I have to wire the door shut and it sprinkles flakes of rust on the food while the food is cooking.” Some months later, she reported a termite infestation: “The wood is riddled with holes already and in the evening hours literally thousands of termites pour out of these holes and fly about, making the room and the back sitting area unusable.”) Ford had a fleet of cars with drivers—though Ann employed her own, a man who had driven her Agency for International Development jeep in Semarang. The foundation ferried expatriate staff members in a carpool back and forth along the twenty-minute drive between Kebayoran Baru and the office. There was annual home leave for the entire family, with travel arrangements made by the foundation. There were provisions for spouse travel and “educational travel for dependent children,” annual physicals and vaccinations. Children of the program staff rode a school bus together to the Jakarta International School, where—along with the offspring of diplomats, oil company executives, and missionaries—they performed in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and recited the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore in the original Bengali. Ford arranged for enrollment and paid the tuition. “Everything seems set at the school for Maya,” Kessinger, who served on the school’s board, wrote to Ann in December 1980. He had, he said, “personally spoken to the Superintendent and [had] been assured that a place will be saved for her.”

  Ann worked three days a week in the Ford offices in a white-washed colonial-style building with a steeply sloping tile roof on Taman Kebon Sirih (Betel Tree Garden) in Central Jakarta. Formerly a private home, the building sat squarely on a low-lying lot next to a canal. In the rainy season, brown water seeped up through the tile floors, swamping the metal file cabinets, saturating paperwork, and staining the walls. The staff fell roughly into two groups: The program staff was transient, white, and mostly male; and the administrative, clerical, and support staff tended to be permanent, Indonesian, and female. A photograph taken during Ann’s tenure shows a dozen Indonesian women, all smiling and many of them dressed in batik, arrayed in front of a half-dozen mostly Caucasian men in neckties and short-sleeved plain white shirts. Floating half hidden in between is the only Western woman, Ann. Kessinger, whose title as the head of the office was country representative, had been a member of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers sent to India in the early sixties. He had worked in community development in the Punjab before returning to the United States to study history and anthropology, writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago on the social and economic history of an Indian village. He was a tenured professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, married to an Indian, when Ford hired him in 1977 and sent him first to New Delhi. In the Jakarta office, Kessinger was a jovial presence, inclined toward the informal management style of academia, not the top-down style of the corporate world. The program officers, with Ph.D.’s in fields like comparative world history, specialized in areas such as natural resources, epidemiology, education, and traditional Indonesian culture. “There was a sense of idealism, but there was also a certain smugness of the ‘best and the brightest’ culture,” said Sidney Jones, who went to work for Ford in Jakarta in 1977, initially in a job she said was known as “the ingenue role,” because it was not expected to lead anywhere better. “You never referred to ‘Ford.’ It was always ‘The Foundation.’”

  The job of program officer required a mix of skills and talents. As Kessinger described it to me, a program officer had to talk to a lot of people, then think about the issues, then consider the context—within the Ford Foundation, in the Indonesian government, among other donors. As Jones put it, one had to think strategically about how to plant money in different places in order to bring about a desired transformation or change. “If you want to increase access to justice, for example, you think, ‘Okay, we’ve got the legal-aid group that works with one set of people,’” she said. “‘It would probably be a good idea to get a couple of really bright people trained in some kind of legal approach so that you can have those people in law faculties in a number of places. It would be good to get some judges or others to have exposure to what’s done in places where there is really good access.’ You put all the pieces together and you get a program.”

  As for herself, she said, “I just tended to take really interesting projects and fund them—without thinking very far ahead about what the end result was.”

  Within a week or two of starting at Ford, Ann flew to India on a trip that would end up shaping her approach to her job from then on. A young program officer in New York, Adrienne Germain, who had been working with the international program staff to increase Ford’s involvement in the advancement of women, had invited Ann to join her on a trip she was taking. Unlike Indonesia, India already had a movement to improve the condition of poor working women. Ford was in contact with groups organizing street vendors and other self-employed women. Germain, who several months later would become the foundation’s first female country representative and be sent to Bangladesh, had extended the invitation, she told me, “as a way of collaborating with Ann—to say, ‘Look, these are the kind of women-specific programs that are going on that are really quite impressive and that you won’t yet see in Indonesia.’”

  They met with leaders of the Self Employed Women’s Association, a then nine-year-old trade union
based in Ahmedabad with roots in the country’s labor, cooperative, and women’s movements, which has since gone on to create a network of cooperatives and India’s first women’s bank. They visited the Working Women’s Forum, started by a former Congress Party activist named Jaya Arunachalam, which within a decade would become not just a union of poor women but a network of cooperatives encouraging entrepreneurship by making low-interest loans. They met washerwomen, known as dhobis, in the slums of Madras. Germain had first worked abroad while still an undergraduate at Wellesley College, tagging along for six months on a household survey in Peru that took her to the slums of Lima; she had strong feelings about how one should behave when working in other people’s countries. Ann impressed her, Germain remembered many years later. She listened well—not to get information to do her job but because she wanted to learn. She was not, Germain said, “thinking at the top, which is where a lot of Ford was: ‘Let’s build our universities and let’s get our intellectual capital going.’” Ann seemed to believe that you could not help people unless you learned from them first. “It was the most interactive way of being and of taking time,” Germain recalled. “A lot of times, in all kinds of jobs, people didn’t feel like they had that kind of time; they were there to make grants and move money. Often they didn’t think much about: Could the project really be implemented the way it was? What would be the consequences? They weren’t going to be around to learn the consequences. Ann was never like that. Ann was very aware that money doesn’t necessarily solve problems.”

  What Ann saw in India left a deep impression. For years afterward, she would point to the organizations she had seen on that trip as examples of what might be possible elsewhere. Occasionally, she would use Ford grant money to send Indonesian activists to India to see for themselves. The size of the women’s organizations in India astonished her. “She thought to herself, ‘Why can’t we do more than these itsy-bitsy NGOs? Why can’t we take this to scale?’” said Richard Holloway, her friend from Semarang. Back in Jakarta, Ann wrote to Viji Srinivasan, a Ford colleague in New Delhi who had traveled with her and Germain: “The India trip certainly set my mind moving in some new directions. Could Indonesian women in the informal sector be organized a la the Working Women’s Forum? (But where will we ever find a new Jaya Arunachalam?) Could a SEWA-like cooperative bank for women be organized in the Indonesian context?”

  Anyone interested in the condition of poor women in Indonesia faced a shortage of data. Only a handful of Indonesian researchers were interested in women’s issues, William Carmichael, Ford’s vice president in charge of its developing-country programs, would write several years later in a Ford report; and most of those scholars had studied urban middle-class women. The exception was Pujiwati Sajogyo, a sociologist at the Center for Rural Sociological Studies at the Bogor Agricultural Institute. Married to one of the country’s top experts on rural development and poverty alleviation, she had studied rural women in West Java in the late 1970s. The Sajogyos were “two of the more original and interesting researchers working on issues that the government thought were sensitive,” Kessinger told me. Pujiwati Sajogyo’s research, funded by Ford, was among the first to shed light on work patterns by gender in rural households and villages. In 1980, Ford gave the agricultural institute another $200,000 to develop detailed data on rural women outside Java and to increase the country’s capacity to carry out that sort of research. Under the grant, young researchers from the provinces were to be trained and sent out to study the lives of village women. A project specialist from Ford would help analyze data from village studies and run workshops in field research for graduate students and junior faculty. The aim was to build a national network of researchers on issues involving women, increase the supply of data, and make it available to program designers and policy makers. During her first two years at Ford, Ann was the project specialist assisting Sajogyo.

  Twice a week, Ann would be driven south from Jakarta to Bogor, the hill town where generations of colonials, including Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British lieutenant governor of Java during the brief British occupation of parts of the Dutch East Indies, had repaired in the early nineteenth century to escape the swelter of summer. The university lay alongside a wide boulevard, facing the Bogor Botanical Gardens, conceived a century and a half earlier by a Dutch botanist with the help of assistants from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. With fifteen thousand species of trees and plants, the Bogor gardens surrounded the Indonesian president’s summer palace. “I might mention that I’m in Bogor every Tuesday and Thursday at Pujiwati’s office,” Ann wrote in 1981 to Carol Colfer, an American anthropologist working in Indonesia, who had sent a letter proposing that she and Ann meet. “I see from your itinerary you will also be in Bogor on Tuesday, March 17. We could have a picnic in the garden.”

  That summer, Ann flew with Sajogyo to Sumatra, where they spent a week visiting universities, giving presentations on women and development, explaining field research methodologies, and interviewing candidates for the training workshop they planned to hold in Bogor a month later. Finding the right researchers was not simple. At the University of North Sumatra in Medan, all eleven candidates were unsuitable: Either they were from unrelated fields, such as art, or they had no experience in villages and had never done research on rural women. In Padang, the capital of West Sumatra, the university rector preferred hiring men as instructors because, he said, women went off on pregnancy leave or balked at leaving their husbands. Traveling alone in South Sumatra, Ann found that the cultural complexity of the region presented additional research challenges. There were four distinct ecological zones and fourteen indigenous ethnic groups, each with its own dialect or, in some cases, language. There were also migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia, some relocated by the government from densely populated parts of the country. The experiences of women varied widely from one ethnic group to the next; one, for example, kept teenage girls in purdah. “With all this complexity, the difficulty of selecting truly representative sample villages is enormous,” Ann wrote in a report on the progress of the project.

  By late September, Ann and Sajogyo had enlisted eighteen researchers from eight universities in seven provinces to meet in Bogor for the workshop in preparation for heading out into the field. Twelve were women. Ann and the Sajogyos taught seminars on a dozen topics, from theories of social structure to the role of women in small industries and petty trade. Well-known Indonesian social scientists gave guest lectures. The government’s junior minister for women’s affairs spoke on the connection between policy-making and research. The young researchers were to collect data on three subjects: time and labor allocation, income and expenditures, and decision-making. Each also chose a special area of interest. They would be working in Sumatra, Sulawesi, East Java, and Nusa Tenggara Timur, a group of islands in eastern Indonesia. They would be studying a half-dozen ethnic groups—from Bataks to transmigrant Javanese—in villages that made handicrafts, farmed fish, harvested forest products, and grew such things as rice, coconuts, coffee, rubber, and cloves.

  Ann went into the field, too. Bill Collier, whom she had known since the early 1960s at the University of Hawai‘i and who had known both of her husbands, was working on a separate study in tidal-swamp areas of South Sumatra. His team was studying agricultural systems and the condition of several ethnic groups, including indigenous Malays, Buginese migrants, and Javanese transmigrants. Ann joined the group, moving from village to village on a grid of rivers and canals, traveling by night in wooden boats in crocodile-infested waters. The group slept on the floors of village leaders’ houses, built on stilts. Because the Buginese distrusted the Javanese, Collier told me, the Javanese members of the research team would insist that he and Ann step out of the boats first in every Buginese village. In one area where Ann was hoping to conduct interviews, the local leader was said to have a long arrest record for robbery and a murder, committed ostensibly with the help of his wife. He had returned from prison, and everyone in the vill
ages deferred to him: “If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to tell him first,” Collier said. The man assigned his wife and alleged co-conspirator as Ann’s escort—to convince the Buginese to talk. Through flooded rice fields and swarms of mosquitoes, Ann and her escort crossed from one canal to the next on foot. “Ann ended up up to her chest in water and mud,” Collier remembered. “She loved it. She could create a rapport with these people very easily, because she was sympathetic and she liked them. They realized that she was there trying to find out things to help.”