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

by Janny Scott

  Life at Women’s World Banking was consuming. The two dozen employees were mostly young, female, unmarried, and childless. Driven by devotion to “the mission” and an esprit de corps cultivated from the top, they toiled long hours in an office culture that more than one of them remembered years later as having the intimacy and intensity of a dysfunctional family. Barry pegged the pay and benefits to those of other not-for-profits; she scrimped, she told me, only on vacations. The staff was international and impressively credentialed. Kellee Tsai, the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, had come straight from a financial analyst’s job at Morgan Stanley, putting away her pearls and lipstick and fully expecting a cohort of hirsute women in vintage clothing. Instead, she found hyperarticulate women in saris and handcrafted jewelry, and Christmas parties catered by a high-end Upper West Side boîte. The financial products and services coordinator was a young Australian woman with an MBA from Harvard who had run the Australian government’s food aid program in Ethiopia. The regional coordinator for Africa was a Kenyan-born, British-trained accountant who had been the first in her peasant family to go to university. The communications coordinator, a British-born lawyer, had grown up in Pakistan and Iraq, where she could remember having watched her mother water-skiing on the Tigris in a bikini. Other staff members were Indian, Ecuadorean, Colombian, Canadian, American, Honduran, Haitian, Ghanaian. The calendar was crowded with conferences in foreign capitals such as Tokyo, Accra, and Mexico City. “In many ways, it was one of the most dysfunctional organizations I’ve ever worked in,” said Nina Nayar, who worked at Women’s World Banking as Ann’s assistant. “But I have never felt such warmth, such passion, such excitement. It was like a soap opera: You’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re celebrating, you miss people, you love people, you hate people, and you know that this is all psychodrama, but you’re so hooked on it that you have to be there every day at three o’clock to see this thing.”

  Office space was tight. Despite her seniority, Ann doubled up in a small, dark room in the back of the building with Kellee Tsai, who was a few years older than Maya. Accessible only through a windowless word-processing zone nicknamed “the bunker,” the room had back-to-back desks and a view into the wall of the next building, a few feet away. Women’s World Banking had not lavished attention on developing well-oiled office systems; if a person needed something done, she might be best off doing it herself. Ann, for the first time in a long time, was without secretarial assistance. “She couldn’t type to save her life,” one colleague remembered. And on matters technological, she was the opposite of self-sufficient. An aspiring Irish-born playwright named Donald Creedon, who had worked as a Manhattan doorman before learning word processing, served as “computer coordinator.” He devoted his time to helping staff members get their computers to do what they wanted. Ann, wedded to an outdated version of word-processing software, needed constant assistance. Creedon, ensconced in the bunker, would hear her cry out in frustration. “Then she would call my name—without moving,” he said. “The expectation was probably, ‘You can come and help me type this thing. Because I need help.’”

  Ann’s office became a magnet for younger colleagues. When she was stuck on a piece of writing, she might be found holed up back there—like the village elder, Creedon thought—telling stories. They were not about her but about people she had met, worlds she had known, absurdities she had witnessed. Stories sprang from her head fully formed, many of them endowed with the clarifying wisdom of myths. Younger women would find excuses to wander down to word processing for a chat. With her glasses on a chain around her neck or perched on the tip of her nose if she was reading, Ann seemed perpetually on the verge of smiling. She was mischievous and witty. She worked her dark, shapely eyebrows for emphasis, her toothy grin for punctuation—sometimes the tip-off that she had made a joke at the expense of someone present, who might catch on a minute or two late. “Maybe because she was an observer, she saw how ridiculous things could be,” recalled Brinley Bruton, a young program assistant in the office. “I remember her literally sitting back and wiping tears away from her eyes because she was laughing so hard. She had that kind of laugh—a belly laugh.”

  One of Ann’s stories—at least as one colleague remembered it years later—concerned a group of village women from Africa and Indonesia. On some earlier occasion, Ann had invited them to get together to talk about their lives. During a discussion of similarities and differences, the Indonesian women mentioned an unusual practice: After childbirth, a woman would put a salt pack in her vagina, ostensibly to restore its firmness. The practice was painful, the women conceded. But it was thought to help women remain “young” for their husbands. The African women were incredulous: Why would a woman willingly inflict pain on herself? “The Indonesian women—or so Ann told the story—asked, ‘What do you do, then, to be able to continue to please your husbands?’” recalled the colleague who was present. “The African women all rolled about laughing and said, ‘We find a bigger man!’”

  Sometimes, Ann was the anthropologist in the field, with Women’s World Banking as her village. She could capture the essence of a personality in an anecdote, even in a subordinate clause. “She would not be the type who would do well in a conventional organization, because she was very straightforward in her views on everything and often did it with humor—humor that had a bite,” Nancy Barry told me. Ann toyed with the idea of writing a murder mystery set at one of Women’s World Banking’s global meetings, during which sleep-deprived staffers pulling all-nighters in the service of the mission occasionally almost came to blows. It was said that a delegate had returned to her home country after one global meeting and promptly expired. A recurring topic of conversation in the office concerned who would be the murder victim in Ann’s book, some of her colleagues told me. Others, however, said the victim was to be Barry; only the identity of the murderer remained up for grabs. “Of course, it could have been anyone,” Ann confided conspiratorially to Creedon. “Because, God knows, there were enough people who had a motive.”

  Several younger women in the office told me that in those days, they wanted to be Ann. Her assistant, Nina Nayar, an Indian woman then in her mid-twenties, had an undergraduate degree in anthropology, a master’s in South Asian regional studies, and experience working in Ahmedabad with the Self-Employed Women’s Association. The child of supportive but protective parents, Nayar told me that Ann, by example, taught her how to live. To Nayar, Ann seemed unconcerned about society’s opinions about working women, single women, women who married outside their culture or tradition—women who, as Nayar put it, dreamed big and pursued their dreams and were fearless in the pursuit of adventure and knowledge. Ann did not seem, at least to Nayar, to feel that marriage as an institution was essential or even particularly important. What mattered was to have loved passionately and deeply, to have had lasting relationships, to have lived honestly and without pretense. She never spoke of her marriages as mistakes or failures; they had simply worked out differently than expected. Nor was she haunted by decisions she had made. “The past was her past,” said Wanjiku Kibui, Ann’s Kenyan colleague, whom Ann affectionately referred to as her in-law. “But it was not a prison.” When Nayar told Ann that she intended never to marry, Ann suggested Nayar was simply trading one orthodoxy for another. Ann advised Nayar to remain open. Niki Armacost, who became the communications coordinator, said of Ann, “She was the opposite of uptight. It was like, ‘Oh, interesting! So that’s how those people live.’ I think she was a very principled person, but she was not a judgmental person. She had a set of principles, and tolerance was one of the principles. But she didn’t lecture people about those things.”

  Business trips became field trips. When Ann and Nayar traveled together, it was Nayar’s job to make sure Ann could get coffee at five a.m., as soon as she got up. In Jakarta, Ann took Nayar into the kampungs and in pursuit of the best street food: “Oh my God, my taste buds have finally come alive!” Nayar remembered her saying. In ot
her cities, there were outings to anthropological museums and art museums and shops specializing in silver jewelry: “I will have to starve for the rest of the month, but I had to get this silver and turquoise thing,” Ann would say, according to Nayar. “Isn’t it magnificent?” Several younger colleagues suggested to Ann that they should all live together in Bali. “We talked about Alice Dewey’s house, so we said, ‘Ann, why don’t you set up a house for us in Bali and we’ll come there and do our dissertations together?’” Nayar recalled. “‘You can be one of our readers. We’ll take care of you and you can take care of our dissertations.’ She thought it was a brilliant idea.” Ann was a mentor to several younger women, but she had her limits. On the elevator one day, Brinley Bruton, who had been trying her hand at fiction, asked Ann if she would read one of her stories. “Which was, in fact, ‘I want you to read this story and tell me it’s wonderful,’” Bruton remembered. Unapologetically, Ann declined. “I came out of it feeling a little hurt,” Bruton told me. “But in retrospect, I have respect for her. She wasn’t going to pretend.”

  Ann arrived at Women’s World Banking during the long lead-up to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, which was to be held in Beijing in September 1995. To organizations like Women’s World Banking, the conference offered an opportunity to promote their agenda. Discussions of the status of women had tended to focus on matters like health, education, and reproductive rights. But women made up the majority of the economically active poor in the world. Over the previous two decades, institutions had begun offering financial services for low-income women producers and entrepreneurs. As a result, their enterprises had flourished and the role of women in the economy had grown. Yet even the leading microfinance institutions were reaching only a tiny fraction of the women who could benefit. Women’s World Banking saw the conference, and a parallel forum for nongovernmental organizations, as a chance to change the policies of governments, banks, and donors so that financial services to the poor could grow. Ann made the case to Barry that Women’s World Banking ought to play a role in organizing many of the disparate microfinance institutions into a movement. If a coalition of organizations could agree on an agenda and demonstrate the contributions of low-income women to economic development, it could catapult the issue of microfinance into a prominent place in the “platform of action” that would eventually be endorsed by the nearly two hundred countries expected to be represented in Beijing.

  Barry was skeptical about Ann’s suggestion of a coalition. She saw the other organizations as competitors vying for the favor of a finite number of donors. Women’s World Banking had worked hard in its early years to differentiate itself from the others, defining itself in part by what it was not. That is, it was not like Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the largest and most successful financial intermediaries focused on the rural poor; it was not like ACCION International, another microfinance organization with a network of lending partners. Barry, who had been on the board of Women’s World Banking during those early years, had been influenced by what she later called “that kind of insular, go-it-alone, we-are-the-best, we-are-different mentality.” She doubted that some groups would be willing to collaborate. She worried that time would be wasted trying to bring together organizations with divergent interests. Instead, she favored what she described as a more unilateral approach—that is, one in which Women’s World Banking was in charge. “It kind of made me nervous,” she told me. “Even though I’m a big believer in building coalitions—coalitions that we lead, if you know what I mean.”

  Barry was “a pretty tough character to deal with,” she told me, looking back on those years with a degree of self-knowledge and candor that was striking. She had grown up in a Catholic family in Orange County, California. One uncle was a priest who had marched with the labor leader César Chávez. A great-aunt was a nun. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School, Barry had worked in Tanzania for McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, before going to work for the World Bank for fifteen years. At Women’s World Banking, she was bent on results. She took dissent personally. Small things—say, the wrong word in a business plan—could set her off. She felt she had to manage everyone—the funders, the board, the affiliates. “It wasn’t like Women’s World Banking was the leader of the network,” she told me. “I was the leader of the network. So I was like the big brain, and everybody else was feeding into the big brain.” Younger women on the staff, swept up in the mission, tended not to challenge Barry. “If you’re a young twenty-five-year-old and you’re working with somebody that is working on something supercompelling, with unbelievably interesting people and with a mission to die for, you’re a net learner, so you’re kind of into it for at least ten years,” Barry said. “By the time you get ten years into it, hopefully you actually know that I’m a good-hearted person and you’ve learned how to manage me. But for Ann, who was also very strong-headed and strong-willed, I think it was not fun.”

  Ann was not afraid to take on Barry. She had little patience with the shorthand that is useful and necessary in corporate life for selling an idea, and she was unwilling to make any claim—about, say, loan repayment rates and women—without the data to back it up. She preferred to acknowledge what was not known, then go find the answer. “She would sell an idea by saying, ‘Well, we don’t know the answer. That’s why it’s important that you fund us,’” Nayar remembered. “There was no halfway. In the business of development, academics have a very limited role. You can’t indulge in spending weeks and months on research. Oftentimes, deadlines are what we’re led by. Ann didn’t live by those rules. She would say, ‘If I have to get this thing ready, I am going to research it, I’m not just going to give you sound-bite stuff. If it’s got my name on it, it has to be right.’ It used to drive us crazy. We had to push Ann to do something. There would be much ‘Oh, c’mon, Ann. Get it over with.’ But I understand. She would never produce anything that she was not proud of.”

  The confrontations between Ann and Barry became, to Nayar, the clash of the Titans. “I had the luxury of being in on all their meetings,” she said. “It was horrible. I can understand Nancy, because I’m very much a can-do, will-do, do-it-now person. But I also related to Mother Ann.” Barry needed justification for the policy statements the organization was making. “For instance, ‘Women are good clients.’ Okay, what are the ways that we can prove that?” Nayar said. “Ann would want to write a dissertation. And Nancy just wants, like, ‘For example, boom, boom, boom.’” According to Nayar, “Ann would say, ‘I can’t whip things together into nonsensical bullet points. I need to have justifications for all my bullet points. So that’s a paragraph!’ And Nancy says, ‘Cut it down, cut it down.’” Colleagues joked that Ann had been in Asia too long. She had a different sense of time, and instead of arguing, she preferred to debate or discuss. Over time, it seemed to Nayar, the conflict forced Ann to become more confrontational and assertive. “Both are demonic once they get on their high horse,” Nayar said. “God can’t turn them around. It was just two very strong women.”

  At other times, Ann seemed to fret about not meeting Barry’s expectations. “Nancy would be harping on her: ‘Are you done with that yet? You’re still working on that?’” Kellee Tsai, Ann’s office mate, remembered. “Nancy had her in tears so many times, it was horrible.”

  As Barry herself put it, “Because of my pigheadedness, you actually had to be pigheaded to get your way.” Each person in the office had her own approach. Wanjiku Kibui, the regional coordinator for Africa, would call Barry out, in a way that Barry appreciated, when she was, as Barry put it later, “misbehaving.” Niki Armacost, the communications coordinator, would find a better time. “Ann would just stay,” Barry remembered. “She would stay and fight.” On the question of the coalition of microfinance organizations, she would not back down. In a series of long, uncomfortable meetings with Barry, Ann insisted that Women’s World Banking use its influence for a greater good. To do otherwise would
be small-minded and selfish. “We have to be grown-ups now,” Barry remembered Ann saying, in effect. “She would have used language like that.” Intentionally or not, Ann made Barry feel guilty: “I don’t think she was ever mean-spirited or nasty, but she could not have been more direct about what was at stake and why it was the right thing.”

  Eventually, Barry relented. In October 1993, Women’s World Banking joined two dozen other microfinance organizations to form the International Coalition on Women and Credit. Its aim was to influence the opinions of policy-makers at a series of regional conferences leading up to Beijing. Coalition members would hold workshops, publicize the successes of microfinance and microenterprise, make policy recommendations, and lobby delegates. Finally, they would all converge on Beijing. At Barry’s insistence, Women’s World Banking became the secretariat for the coalition. It fell to Ann, as the policy and research coordinator, to marshal the data needed to back the claims that the coalition would be making and to take the lead in dealing with the other organizations.