Women’s History Month celebrates the vital role of women in America. This year the focus is on the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. My mother was born into a country where suffrage was universal, but she was also born into a nation filled with misogyny, racism, and fear of anything connected with the unknown. And boy, was she the unknown. A graduate of Harvard Design School with colleagues who ended up with work designing the skyline of cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago, she worked in a firm with men who saw this long-legged beauty and felt it appropriate to ask her to make the coffee and on several occasions made remarks and physical advances that in our current climate would be regarded as assault. Rather than complain about these incidents, she preferred to focus on the positive, her family, her friends, her limitless curiosity, her belief that all human beings deserved to be treated equally.

She had the ability to both provoke and soothe. One day at the A&P she noticed a pregnant cashier who was standing at her station. “They need to get you a chair,” she told the woman. 
The woman rolled her eyes and smiled.
“I’m getting you a chair,” she said.

I, being eleven or so was horrified. Why didn’t my mother use hairspray? Why did my mother swim so fast? Why didn’t my mother stay home and when I got off the school bus rush to hug me and ask me about my day at school? Why did she swear so much? 

The manager came out and said, “Madam…“
My mother smiled, “Don’t call me ‘Madam’, that’s just silly. This young woman needs a chair.” She was given a chair. 

My mother campaigned for Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro when those women were running for president. My parents were both advocates for civil rights, environmental protection, and they tithed to every liberal cause you can imagine. My mother remained undaunted by the life she‘d chosen, cooking dinner seven days a week, sewing our clothes, and renovating the house. I picked weeds from our fields to work as trees on her gorgeous architectural models. I also carved my initials into her drafting board with an exacto knife. I spoke of her with intense pride to my friends and other adults but frequently interrupted her meetings with requests for domestic duties I could easily do myself. I loved my mother so much my nightmares as a child were about her leaving me or dying. Yet I saw her refusal to buy plastic stuff, the currency of the sixties as perverse. When she sent me to school with a sandwich wrapped in tin foil without a bag, I felt abused. When there was nothing to snack on in our house but rice or oatmeal or possibly a carrot I saw my friends as living a perfect life, unlike my own.

She told me how proud she was of me, how happy I made her and we both let go of the pain and the anger of my early alcoholism, celebrating my recovery. Through two failed marriages she remained convinced I was nothing but a prize. She adored my husband, Timo, a Chicago ironworker, loving how they could discuss topics I loathed connected with lumber and how things were built.

My mother was an incredible architect with the foresight to design environmentally friendly houses and additions, who had studied with a student of Walter Gropius, who designed an addition to Einstein’s house, who once waltzed with James Baldwin, a feminist, a mother, my mother. She died September 23rd, 2019.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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