Edna Sawyer was born on August 13th, 1917 in Jonesport, Maine. Located at the Eastern tip of the continental US, the town was and still is characterized by weathered lobster boats and rocky islands. John Hanson, a Maine publisher, wrote of one photographer’s images from Jonesport and the surrounding landscape, “[they] show the nobility of tools, the demands of hard work, the challenges of place…the grit is neither glamorized nor fetishized”. That statement easily could have been describing my grandmother, indicating to what extent her hometown contributed to her sense of self.
Edna Sawyer was the oldest child and only daughter of Edith Alice Kelley, an Irish Protestant Schoolteacher, and Wellington Oliver Sawyer, a nautical engineer. Raised in the 1920’s and 30’s, Edna faced stiflingly rigid notions of gender. Her father, being out to sea for his job, was physically absent much of the time. But through letters he impressed upon her a very firm, if well-intentioned, attitude that a woman’s role was that of domestic, moral authority.
I am glad you are doing so well with your studies and enjoyed table service at the social. It shows that all you have to do to accomplish these things is to listen to Mother and put your heart into the task at hand, whether it be school work, church work, or helping Mother…and I do hope you enjoy helping, because she is the best Mother in the world and is doing everything possible for all of us. We will make no mistake in showing our appreciation in every way we can. You kind of keep an eye on the boys and see that they do their part in everything too. Just because they happen to be boys don’t let them out of housework.
(Letter to Edna from her father, December 12, 1929)
But Edna found herself at odds with these gendered expectations that channeled her to be above all maternal. On merit she was accepted to an all girl’s preparatory School in Boston, a significant achievement for a young woman of middleclass pedigree during the Great Depression. And although she excelled academically while there, social norms didn’t conceive of college as the next logical step. Her father, though unconditionally loving, maintained like many others at the time that the appropriate professions for a woman were either secretary or nurse. These occupations would allow her to balance marriage and domestic duties, and to maintain ‘mother’ as her primary identity.
In the eyes of Edna’s daughter, Laurel, “there was that kind of discrimination in the family, where it was ok for the boys to do what they needed to do, and it was ok for them to be smart but she was just a girl.” This family attitude was, in essence, the manifestation of the deeply ingrained social valuation of women. Because gender norms were so uncontested by others and so unnecessary to Edna, she formed a precarious relationship with the issue that would affect her in ways that no other social institution would.
