Dorothy's Background
B
orn in 1918, Dorothy Ann was the second girl born to Walter and Bertha Huskey. Even as a child, she seemed to be something of an outsider. She reported, for example, that when the girls in the family grew old enough to fuss about their appearance, her sister Bea would often spend Saturday night fixing everybody’s hair…everybody except Dorothy.
Dorothy was the only one of the four Huskey girls to go on to college. She attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville with her brother Eugene, and told of riding to the campus in his car in the years just before World War II. When money for college became scarce, Dorothy took out a student loan.
She won a scholarship to attend another college out of state. I think this may have been a source of conflict between Dorothy and her father. I’ve long assumed that he probably thought it was “unladylike” for a young woman to be pursuing a career outside the home. In a letter dated May 1961, Dorothy wrote:
“I loved my father, a tyrant, and did only what would please him. Once I had a lucrative scholarship to prepare for a position in administration and supervision in industry, and the night before I was to leave home I couldn’t. I stayed home with my father. So you see it is incredible that I am able to go around the world alone. But I do not want to be alone. I want to belong to someone; someone who will be kind and tender and understanding, and who will take care of me.”
D
orothy Huskey grew up in east Tennessee long before the women’s liberation movement made it socially acceptable for a woman to choose a career outside the home. Raised in a culture that provided very few role models for competitive, intellectual, wage-earning professional women, Dorothy carved out a remarkable career path for herself, competing successfully with men in the academic world. Committed to education, she dedicated her life and her resources to teaching people how to better themselves. You might even say she was married to the practice of providing an education.
In 1957, Dorothy accepted a job that would involve her in an overseas project with the Ford Foundation. She shipped off to Madras, India, on a two-year assignment. The primary focus of that work was to explore ways to educate poor rural farmers about the importance of sanitation. Her group was literally teaching the village-level workers how to dig pit latrines, then educating them as to why they should use these instead of their own crop fields as a toilet. To a mind steeped in superstition and tradition, such basic science and hygiene can seem very foreign.
In addition to dealing with village-level resistance, Dorothy also found herself grappling with a governmental bureaucracy in which many individuals with the authority to make changes were reluctant to take any action that might be politically risky, should it offend someone else in power.
Amid all this, Dorothy found herself swept up in the everyday drama of the Indian culture, rich with tradition, and redolent with the aromas, tastes, and textures of Hindu life.
An Unexpected Memoir
D
uring her stay in India, Dorothy kept an extensive personal journal as a way to document her professional accomplishments and to provide a time line for the progress of the program. Because the friends and colleagues to whom Dorothy mailed back copies of her journal entries kept most of the personal letters she wrote during that time, the collection of all this material provides a rich and fascinating look at both the sociological aspects of India, as well as a rare snapshot of her personal life.
Her friend and colleague, Dr. Chamberlain, collected all the letters and journal pages that Dorothy sent, and upon her return four years later he presented it all back to her in a suitcase.
In the 1990s, I worked with Dorothy to produce a manuscript. She intended to publish her journal entries as a field guide for health education in foreign countries. She never considered including her letters. I recognized the wonderful story in the material, and after her death, I worked to bring it to book form as a memoir.