1A: Nancy Mairs (b. July 23, 1943)

To learn more about Mairs go to her official website: http://nancymairs.com/  Her biography can be found here.  Follow this link to see a good video with Mairs. To learn more about Multiple Sclerosis, go to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Mayo Clinic pages.

& Thou Shalt Honor: Nancy Mairs Interview with PBS Tucson

Nancy Mairs and her husband George Mairs were interviewed by Dale Bell of PBS Tucson. Original Airdate: August 2, 1995. Nancy Mairs' s response follows. Nothing is straightforward. Confinement is a curse; confinement is a blessing. Oh I hate the limitations. There are specific parts of limitations that I especially hate. I was always a walker, and I just miss being able to get up and take off and walk somewhere. Probably the greatest source of pain has been that I can't be with my grandchildren the way I want to be. You know, I can sit and look at them, but I can't pick them up, I can't cuddle them, I can't run around after them, I can't take care of them. If I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. Interestingly I've started doing it in dreams. I've started dreaming about them a lot as though, perhaps that was a way of acting on my desires, since I no longer had a way of doing so in my conscious life so I could do it in my dream life. But it's a blessing also, because that very sitting -- I say I sit and look at my grandchildren, that way I see them in a way that perhaps nobody else does. You know, if things are flashing by you, you don't have time to contemplate them and cherish them, you don't know that you're not doing it. And that's part of the reason why I refer to people that other people may refer to as able-bodied, as non-disabled. Because they lack disability. They have a whole element in their lives that they lack. And I have that element in my life. Because I wasn't born disabled, I also have grounds for comparison. I started my life as a non-disabled person, and I know my losses very sharply -- very painfully -- but I also know my gains. I don't know whether my relationship with George is unique, because I have no grounds for comparison. In other words, every relationship is by definition unique. But I think there are some unusual aspects judging from my observation of other people's relationships. And I've often tried to characterize it without making it sound ideal in some way. It's ordinary. It's just the way we are. Other people however, tend to respond, well, very warmly to it; as if they took reassurance from it; as if they took strength from it. Although my wedding day is sort of a blur, we must have pledged to love and honor each other, because that's in the traditional marriage ceremony. I'm sure that I at least, I can't speak for George, that I had no idea what I was pledging to do. I wonder if anybody ever does. When you wind up requiring personal care, then I think it's easy to fall into a pattern of thinking, well, George is an extension of me, and should know what I want, what I need, when I want it, when I need it, and I do fall into that trap regularly, and I have to stop and remind myself George hasn't that obligation. So I suppose that for me honoring him, is backing up and looking at him as a person. As not me, or a part of me but as a wonderful, separate being. I mean, to be as helpless as I am, means that it would be easier to die. It would be easier for everybody, if I just died. If we're talking ease, and in our society ease is a very great value, for it to be easy. If they get hard, tough, then we think something's wrong. There's something sick about it, there's something the matter and we have to do something to make them easy and comfortable again. Well, if I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. And having George participate in my care and having other people do the same, calls me into life. It says, despite your losses, despite your limitations, you belong here with us and we want you to stay. We want you to stay enough that we're willing to participate in the labor that it takes. That's perhaps the fundamental of caregiving -- to enable another to want to be in the world. Not just enable them to be, but to enable them to want to be in the world when it would be easier not to. Historically, I'm depressive, but I'm a suicidal depressive. And there have been times when I've wanted to be dead, and several times when I've tried to be dead. And I'm pretty glad that it didn't work, most days. Most days I'm pretty glad to be here. To be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life. I think all the time about rights for the disabled. Often not in a political sense. I've been an activist on issues of peace and justice in general, but never have focused in upon disability rights exclusively. I do however, serve on the Board of the Arizona Center for Disability Law. And that does a great deal of work towards furthering employment rights and housing rights for people with disabilities. But I think what I'm good for more than anything else is being in the world in a disabled form and therefore confronting the world with its inability to deal with me. For instance I go in to see my doctor, let's say. There's a sign-in sheet. I can't sign in on the sign-in sheet, because the counter is about this high, and the sign-in sheet is on top of the counter, and I can't reach that high. I can't see the person behind the counter to tell that person that I'm here and need to be signed in. But what I can do is shout up, "there's a person down here" and then a little head peers over and I think I have, I hope, made my point, that there are persons this high and at least one of the counters should be cut down to the height of my waist and nobody else's waist. That's become built in to who I am -- to be open about my disability and willing to remind others even at the risk of embarrassing them -- and they do tend to get very embarrassed if they do something heedless. But why should they be embarrassed? Why should somebody expect to know something without experience? It's not like they're dreadful people that it never occurred to them that the counter was too high. They should hear me when I tell them that the counter is too high, and respond by lowering the counter. So one of the functions I can serve is help people to see that there are angles that they may not have considered. An extra vision. An extra perspective that they haven't had occasion to know yet, but that they might have occasion to know. That of course is the source of the resistance, I think, is in order to be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life, and most people are too terrified to do that. They resist it; it will never happen to me. Mairs talked about Voice Lessons with PBS Tucson on August 2, 1995.  Click here for the program. The New York Times HERS By Nancy Mairs;  Published: July 9, 1987 FOR months now I've been consciously searching for representations of myself in the media, especially television. I know I'd recognize this self because of certain distinctive, though not unique, features: I am a 43-year-old woman crippled by multiple sclerosis; although I can still totter a short distance with the aid of a brace and a cane, more and more of the time I ride in a wheelchair. Because of these devices and my peculiar gait, I'm easy to spot even in a crowd. So when I tell you I haven't noticed any woman like me on television, you can believe me. Actually, last summer I did see a woman with multiple sclerosis portrayed on one of those medical dramas that offer an illness-of-the-week like the daily special at your local diner. In fact, that was the whole point of of the show: that this poor young woman had M.S. She was terribly upset (understandably, I assure you) by the diagnosis, and her response was to plan a trip to Kenya while she was still physically capable of making it, against the advice of the young, fit, handsome doctor who had fallen in love with her. And she almost did make it. At least, she got as far as a taxi to the airport, hotly pursued by the doctor. But at the last moment she succumbed to his blandishments and fled the taxi into his manly protective embrace. No escape to Kenya for this cripple. For the rest of Mairs's column click on this. Los Angeles Times Book Review ORDINARY TIME: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, By Nancy Mairs (Beacon Press: $20; 238 pp.) July 11, 1993|Review by Michelle Huneven | Huneven is a fiction writer, a restaurant critic and a graduate student at the Claremont School of Theology Essayist Nancy Mairs is clearly astonished and delighted by at least one plot twist in the story of her own life. "I did not set out to be either a Catholic or a feminist, let alone both at once," she writes in her new book, "Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal." A Congregationalist in childhood, an Episcopalian in young adulthood, she still can't fully embrace the full paradox of her present condition. "A Catholic feminist? Dear God," she exclaims, "couldn't I please be something else?" Known for her extreme, even controversial candor, Mairs has written in "Plaintext" and "Remembering the Bone House" about her own suicide attempts, her crippling depressions, extramarital affairs and ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis. "Ordinary Time," a parallel narrative to these works, is another pass through her life, this time as seen through the twin lenses of Catholicism and feminism. For the rest of Huneven's review click on this.

DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN MASTERS (STREAMING AT PBS)

Lange at work during the Great Depression.
Photograph by her husband, economist Paul S. Taylor, 1934

The photograph of the dog stand, above, was taken by Dorothea Lange in October 1939 while she was under contract with the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency that hired photographers to document American rural life during the Great Depression. This stand was on U.S. highway 99 in Lane County, Williamette Valley, Oregon. Lange is considered one of the great American photographers, best known for her documentary photographs of rural Americans in the 1930s. A good place to start to learn more about Lange is this video, "Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs," from the Getty Museum. 

Her best known photograph, shown below, is "Migrant Mother," whose subject is Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old widow and farm worker during the Great Depression. It was taken in Nipomo, California in 1936. Four videos at YouTube--Lange's "Migrant Mother" (2:11), CSPAN's Story of "Migrant Mother" (4:09), Lange: An American Odyssey (37:46), and Lange: "Migrant Mother" (23:07)--present reports on Lange and the photograph, an important visual document of 20th Century America. You can find more photographs by Lange at this Library of Congress website. Check this site, too, for more photographs by Lange.

PBS broadcast Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (preview) on Friday, August 29th, 2014, at 9 PM. A trailer for the program appears above. If you missed the broadcast, you can now stream it.  Click here to stream the whole program. 

Her life is reported by bio. Read some of Dorothea Lange's words on photography at Dodho. a magazine of photography. 

Brainpickings presents the story of how Lange's "Migrant Mother" came to be. Read "The Story Behind the Iconic 'Migrant Mother' Photograph and How Dorothea Lange Almost Didn’t Take It" The U.S. Library of Congress Farm Security Administration archive is home to many photos that Lange took when visiting with Florence Thompson, the "Migrant Mother." You may be interested in reading an excerpt from No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The photograph also inspired Marissa Silver to write her novel, Mary Coin. NPR gave it a good review,  as did the Los Angeles Times. 

The photograph, "Migrant Mother," is of Florence Thompson, 32, and is part of the
Library of Congress collection. Lange took the photograph of Thompson
and three of her seven children in 1936, in a pea picking field in Nipomo, California.