The Legacy of Women

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners are all women, which I believe is a first.  The Nobel Committee is to be commended, because this award is well-deserved:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/nobel-peace-prize-johnson-sirleaf-gbowee-karman.html?_r=2&hp

Reading these women’s stories got me thinking about my colleagues.   The women in Educational Studies are fierce, smart, ethical, and strong.  In considering the amazing work they do, I am reminded of my own family members.

My mom, Helen, will be turning 77 this week.  She was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, and spent her girlhood summers in south Georgia. She came up North to Indiana University to get her graduate degree in piano and met an Indiana farm boy in the dorm cafeteria who was working on his MBA.   He bought her first legal drink, along with a bunch of illegal ones before that.  They got married, despite the fact that he was a Yankee.   

What you may not know about southern women of a certain age is that while they may have been bred to be nice, helpful, and all those other traditional feminine qualities, you don’t want to mess with them.  The movie Steel Magnolias didn’t quite capture it, according to Mom, but at least it had the right idea.      

The best example of my mother’s iron will (forget steel—that’s not strong enough) happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She was a church choir director, and also directed a city-wide choir made up of members from many different churches who would sing at special corporate and nonprofit events.  Her church connected with a church in East Germany, and when Mom found out they didn’t have a set of hand bells, she found this upsetting.  EVERY church should have a set of hand bells, as music is an essential part of any church service, and bells were a beautiful and necessary addition.    

Mom spearheaded a monumental fundraising and organizational process, which included booking travel and lodging for 40 people to travel across Germany singing and sightseeing.  Despite all of her preparations, which included plenty of contact with Senator Birch Bayh’s office, they were stopped at Checkpoint Charlie.  The choir spent several scary hours stuck on the bus as the soldiers searched their luggage and rummaged through the velvet-lined cases holding the bells.  I do not know why they finally allowed the Choraliers through the barbed wire and concrete, but I am pretty sure a small gray-haired lady from the South charmed or shamed them into it.  The church congregants were grateful, and the bells continue to ring there, even today.  

My dad is used to strong women.  His mother, Marie, became a schoolteacher in a country school in southern Indiana.  At that time, she did not need a degree to teach (bizarre, I know), but she wanted to be a better teacher and spent her summers at Indiana University and teaching during the school year.  This was in the 1920’s, when very few women earned college degrees.  When she met my grandfather, they had to elope to Kentucky because schoolteachers could not be married.  They came back and she continued to teach for awhile.  Later on, after raising three boys, she retired and wrote columns for local papers on women’s issues. 

While the women in my family would never name themselves as activists, they are strong in their beliefs, their work ethic, and that they have something valuable to contribute to the world.  A worthy legacy indeed.