Before she became Barack Obama’s mother at 18, Ann Dunham was a high school student described by her friends as “intellectually way more mature than we were and a little ahead of her time, in an off-center way,” and as “the original feminist.”
By the time she was 23, Dunham had been married twice, but she never let her personal life interfere with her career as an anthropologist. In 1967, she moved from Honolulu to Jakarta, bringing along a six-year-old Barack Obama, and began what would become a lifelong study of rural blacksmithing traditions in Indonesia.
Through her groundbreaking work in the developing world, she demonstrated that much of the rural poverty in the region stemmed from a lack of resources, not cultural differences with the West, which had been the prevailing theory at the time.
At one point, she also pioneered a microfinance system aimed at providing savings and small loans to rural women—a system that eventually grew into the largest of its kind in the world.