A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [133]
One of Ann’s stories—at least as one colleague remembered it years later—concerned a group of village women from Africa and Indonesia. On some earlier occasion, Ann had invited them to get together to talk about their lives. During a discussion of similarities and differences, the Indonesian women mentioned an unusual practice: After childbirth, a woman would put a salt pack in her vagina, ostensibly to restore its firmness. The practice was painful, the women conceded. But it was thought to help women remain “young” for their husbands. The African women were incredulous: Why would a woman willingly inflict pain on herself? “The Indonesian women—or so Ann told the story—asked, ‘What do you do, then, to be able to continue to please your husbands?’” recalled the colleague who was present. “The African women all rolled about laughing and said, ‘We find a bigger man!’”
Sometimes, Ann was the anthropologist in the field, with Women’s World Banking as her village. She could capture the essence of a personality in an anecdote, even in a subordinate clause. “She would not be the type who would do well in a conventional organization, because she was very straightforward in her views on everything and often did it with humor—humor that had a bite,” Nancy Barry told me. Ann toyed with the idea of writing a murder mystery set at one of Women’s World Banking’s global meetings, during which sleep-deprived staffers pulling all-nighters in the service of the mission occasionally almost came to blows. It was said that a delegate had returned to her home country after one global meeting and promptly expired. A recurring topic of conversation in the office concerned who would be the murder victim in Ann’s book, some of her colleagues told me. Others, however, said the victim was to be Barry; only the identity of the murderer remained up for grabs. “Of course, it could have been anyone,” Ann confided conspiratorially to Creedon. “Because, God knows, there were enough people who had a motive.”
Several younger women in the office told me that in those days, they wanted to be Ann. Her assistant, Nina Nayar, an Indian woman then in her mid-twenties, had an undergraduate degree in anthropology, a master’s in South Asian regional studies, and experience working in Ahmedabad with the Self-Employed Women’s Association. The child of supportive but protective parents, Nayar told me that Ann, by example, taught her how to live. To Nayar, Ann seemed unconcerned about society’s opinions about working women, single women, women who married outside their culture or tradition—women who, as Nayar put it, dreamed big and pursued their dreams and were fearless in the pursuit of adventure and knowledge. Ann did not seem, at least to Nayar, to feel that marriage as an institution was essential or even particularly important. What mattered was to have loved passionately and deeply, to have had lasting relationships, to have lived honestly and without pretense. She never spoke of her marriages as mistakes or failures; they had simply worked out differently than expected. Nor was she haunted by decisions she had made. “The past was her past,” said Wanjiku Kibui, Ann’s Kenyan colleague, whom Ann affectionately referred to as her in-law. “But it was not a prison.” When Nayar told Ann that she intended never to marry, Ann suggested Nayar was simply trading one orthodoxy for another. Ann advised Nayar to remain open. Niki Armacost, who became the communications coordinator, said of Ann, “She was the opposite of uptight. It was like, ‘Oh, interesting! So that’s how those people