They disagreed about most everything.
The right food to feed a baby. The best card game. How much a woman ought to weigh and whether or not she should wear a whalebone corset and stockings even in August heat. Whether she should sit by the pool at the country club or work in the garden when it was 100 degrees.
Grandma loved home churned butter and ice cream made with cream from the Jersey cow, mixed with peaches from the orchard. Mom disapproved and favored salad made with spinach in the days when no one put dark green anything on their iceberg lettuce and cucumber. Grandma liked homemade bread with thick slabs of butter. Mom wanted Rye Crisp with no fat.
Mom made homemade yogurt, so sour everyone wrinkled their nose when they got near the jars of curdled milk. Grandma wouldn’t touch it, of course. She made rice pudding or bread pudding, especially good for babies she thought, with sugar and a sprinkle of nutmeg.
When my mom first visited the Missouri farm with my dad, she offended Grandma by bringing food for my brother and me. Hadn’t Grandma raised two sons? Wasn’t she known at the Audrain County Presbyterian Church as a fantastic cook? My mother disagreed.
My dad went to the county fair for fried chicken and pie. My mother got colitis.
Still, these women who both loved my dad agreed on a few essential things. They both loved Franklin Roosevent and especially his wife Eleanor and wanted me to love her, too.
Grandma was grateful for the rural electrification program since she’d spent years on the farm in Missouri with no electric lights. When I was a child, she still pumped water by hand from the deep well in the yard, but electric lights were everything! Grandma could read sheet music on winter nights and play her piano. She could read a book to me when I stayed the night, rolling into her soft body on the soft bed where my dad once slept.
They also agreed that Eleanor Roosevelt was a powerful woman, almost a saint. When Eleanor helped arrange for Marion Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial at the top of those wide broad steps under that statue of Lincoln, my mom and grandma were thrilled by a dark-skinned woman giving a concert with her huge rich voice. The Daughters of the American Revolution had canceled Anderson’s concert in Constitution Hall. Good Missouri Democrats, my mom and grandma were outraged when Marion Anderson’s concert was canceled because she was black.
Mom honored Katherine Hepburn’s lean silhouette and Grandma admired an opera singer’s full body, but they both loved Eleanor Roosevelt. Together they taught me that racial tolerance and fighting for equality makes every woman beautiful.
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Were your political ideals shaped by the women in your life? Mine certainly were. For other articles about my political activity see Giving Hope a Seat between Anxiety and Grief: Women’s March on Washington. Or for something earlier, Make Love, Not War: 1967.
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