November 29th, Friday | Mom and Baby Barack

The date is November 29th, Friday, and today I’m coming to you from Port Vila, Vanuatu. 

 

And today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, American writer. 

 

Louisa May was born to a small family in 1832 in what is now Philadelphia, PA. They didn’t stay long there. The family would move to Boston shortly following Dad’s dream of founding a Transcendentalist school. The family would move 22 times in 30 years, mostly in and around New England. 

 

While Alcott’s father was a man of high-minded ideals, he was not a man of high income. From a young age Louisa May had to work to supplement the family’s income. She, her mother and sisters worked in a variety of domestic roles from governesses to seamstresses. 

 

Her father’s transcendentalist ideas did allow him to circulate with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and meant he placed a strong emphasis on reading and philosophy. At one point the family corresponded with Frederick Douglass while a housing a fugitive slave as part of the Underground Railroad. 

 

At age 27, Alcott began more seriously, a writing career. She started writing for The Atlantic Monthly, and, after a spell as a nurse in the Civil War— Alcott was a passionate abolitionist— and then as a patient from becoming deathly ill, her writing career took off. She published Hospital Sketches and Moods, both of which were well received for their humor and candor. She took on the pen name A. M. Barnard to publish more adventure-driven stories.

 

When Alcott’s classic Little Women first appeared in 1868, Alcott was skeptical it would be reviewed favorably—perhaps because she was concerned at how close it was to an autobiography. But it did well enough to have three sequels which followed the “little women” from adolescence to adulthood with their own kids: Good Wives, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys. 

 

One of Alcotts childhood homes in Massachusetts is now a museum dedicated to the Alcott family legacy, and Lousia May Alcott was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame 1996. 

 

Today is the birthday of Ann Dunham, American anthropologist. 

 

Dunham was born in Kansas, but became an island girl when she followed her parents in moving to Hawaii. While a student at the new University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Dunham met an intelligent, independent man from Kenya named Barack Obama. The two, Dunham 18 and Obama 23, fell for each other and married, against the wishes of their parents, despite the fact that Ann Dunham Obama was already 3 months pregnant. 

 

Dunham-Obama gave birth to Barack Obama II in August 1961 and was in classes the next semester, this time at the University of Washington in Seattle. Obama, Sr remained in Hawaii working in his original course of study. He departed for Harvard not long after that, Dunham raising little Obama in Hawaii with the help of her parents. Little did she know that her bundle of joy, who she would sometimes take with her to classes, would one day become that Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. 

 

In addition to being a mother, Ann Dunham was an anthropologist who found her calling studying and aiding women of Indonesia. She lived in Jakarta with her second husband and 6-year-old Barack for a number of years before returning to Hawaii to begin work on a PhD, partially funded by a grant from The Asia Foundation. She would return again to Indonesia many times, a champion for women in rural communities and starting one of the early microcredit programs in Indonesia. 

 

 

Lullaby

Louisa May Alcott

 

Now the day is done, 

Now the shepherd sun 

Drives his white flocks from the sky; 

Now the flowers rest 

On their mother's breast, 

Hushed by her low lullaby. 

 

Now the glowworms glance, 

Now the fireflies dance, 

Under fern-boughs green and high; 

And the western breeze 

To the forest trees 

Chants a tuneful lullaby. 

 

 

Now 'mid shadows deep 

Falls blessed sleep, 

Like dew from the summer sky; 

And the whole earth dreams, 

In the moon's soft beams, 

While night breathes a lullaby. 

 

Now, birdlings, rest, 

In your wind-rocked nest, 

Unscared by the owl's shrill cry; 

For with folded wings 

Little Brier swings, 

And singeth your lullaby.

 

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely weekend.