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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252099861 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Emergence
In which it occurs to a New Orleans philanthropist, in the wake of disaster, to form a group
Women of the Storm emerged in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, catastrophic events followed by a slowed and flawed recovery. Consider for a moment the bleak conditions in New Orleans in January 2006. While post-Katrina repopulation estimates varied widely, officials estimated that the population of Orleans Parish on January 1 was about 134,000, or about 71 percent below the pre-Katrina level of 462,269? In neighboring St. Bernard Parish, the population was down by 88 percent, with a population estimate of 8,000 compared to the pre-Katrina figure of 65,554? The infrastructure of New Orleans was in shambles; 45 percent of the city's street-cars and 53 percent of its buses had been destroyed. The number of public transit routes in operation dropped from 57 prior to Katrina to just 28, and there were only approximately 11,709 public transit riders per week, compared to 124,000 before the storm. Fewer than half of the city's 450 traffic lights were working. Officials at the time estimated that it would take another six months to complete the remaining repairs. Only 35 percent of retail food establishments had reopened; only 32 percent of major hospitals were back in operation. Less than 15 percent of public schools in Orleans Parish had reopened, compared to 100 percent in Jefferson Parish and only 7 percent in neighboring St. Bernard Parish. Much of the city felt like a ghost town. Thousands of homes sat vacant, and bodies were still being found.
Anyone who witnessed this ruined landscape would have wondered about how to speed up the recovery. New Orleans philanthropist Anne Milling had been thinking about it for months. Around Thanksgiving 2005, Milling thought that if members of Congress visited the devastation, they would be more likely to direct additional federal funding to the Gulf Coast. Her idea was simple: gather a group of women, charter a plane to Washington, and personally invite lawmakers to see the area for themselves. The proposal was ambitious. But as a wealthy New Orleans woman deeply involved in philanthropic causes, Milling had mastered the art of civic organizing. This "invisible career" (sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels's term that captures the social significance of women's volunteer work) had prepared her well. Her involvement with women's organizations had taught her to think up big ideas and bring them to fruition. She drew upon a long history of women's clubs and institutions that provided women of her race and class background with opportunities to participate in public life. Her biography is part of this long tradition and became important background for WOS; for this reason it is worth considering her personal history before delving into the history of the group.
Anne Catherine McDonald was born in New Orleans on September 26, 1940, to a young, socially connected couple, Hugh Gibson McDonald and Hilda Wasserman McDonald. Anne McDonald spent much of her early childhood in New Orleans, attending elementary school at Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school, where she recalled the nuns being quite "rigid," instilling discipline and respect for elders. At age nine she and her family moved to Monroe, a small city in northeast Louisiana, where Hugh McDonald served as vice president and manager of Krafco Container Company, an industrial plant that produced paper and corrugated boxes. Before bringing the family to Monroe, he had attended Loyola University for two years, but in the hard times of the Depression, he was unable to complete the degree requirements. Hilda Marie Wasserman, on the other hand, earned a bachelor's degree in music from Newcomb College (Tulane University's women's college, which merged with Tulane after Katrina) on June 9, 1931, and was recognized that same year with the Kaiser Medal for Excellence in Music.
The young Anne McDonald enrolled in public school in Monroe, where she was exposed to classmates from varied socioeconomic backgrounds, an early life experience that in many ways set her apart from those whose parochial educations in New Orleans went uninterrupted. She was by all accounts an outstanding student and one of the community's most popular young women. During her years at Neville High School, she moved on from her childhood dream to become a water ballet swimmer like Esther Williams and accumulated a long list of honors, participating in many activities — the French club, the Latin club, and Thespians — and she was the secretary treasurer of her class. She also had athletic ability. Playing the position of forward, she was an all-state basketball player and helped the girls' team win the 1958 state championship. She was part of the Tigerettes, a Neville High "spirit group." A photo in her high school yearbook shows her with five other girls in the cheerleading club encircling a Bengal tiger statue, each girl with a hand on the tiger's back. This all culminated in her senior year when she was crowned homecoming queen.
From Monroe, she returned to New Orleans and enrolled in Newcomb College, just as her mother had done some years earlier. During her time at Newcomb, she pledged in a sorority, Pi Beta Phi, later becoming its president, and she served as president of her senior class. Although popular and active at Newcomb, McDonald did not conquer it as thoroughly as she had her small high school. In her college yearbook, the Jambalaya, McDonald is pictured with her sorority and in her cap and gown with the rest of the senior class; these appearances were buried deep in the yearbook compared to some of the first few pages dedicated to more glamorous portraits of the participants in the Jambalaya beauty contest. Her name did appear frequently in the city's society pages as attending teas, debutante parties, and weddings, though it might very well be that her outsider status as a non-New Orleanian, a young woman from Monroe, made access to some of the city's most important social circles, like the old-line Mardi Gras krewes, more difficult. Young society women are invited to be maids and queens of krewes that hold parades and balls, and the debutante season in New Orleans is calibrated with the Carnival season. During the 1960 Carnival season, Anne McDonald was selected as a maid in the court of Athenians and was presented as a debutante at the ball of the Society of the War of 1812, which was held at the New Orleans Country Club. Many of her classmates at Newcomb were having elaborate coming-of-age parties after being selected as maid, lady-in-waiting, or queen at the lavish krewe balls of the top-rank societies: Comus, Rex, Momus, Proteus, Atlanteans, Oberon, Mithras, and Twelfth Night Revelers. And while the Athenians and the Society of the War of 1812 are not the most prestigious of society organizations, they still qualify as elite organizations. The cultural machinations of New Orleans high society can appear byzantine to outsiders, but they may just make explicit the familiar in-group/out-group dynamics at play throughout the United States, including the fact that status hierarchies exist even among the elite. And they reveal that while McDonald was talented, driven, and well-connected, her chances of becoming a leader of New Orleans social life were not assured — that is, her rise to influence was not a foregone conclusion.
Her academic career at Newcomb culminated in her graduation in 1962, and she earned a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which she used to attend Yale University in 1963. An East Coast school like Yale, her parents decided, was more stable during the turbulent 1960s than going out west to Stanford or Berkeley, where she had also been accepted for graduate school. She recalled that going away to graduate school was something quite novel, even odd, for New Orleans women at the time, and she found the experience to be incredibly stimulating. She lived in the dorms and ate her meals at the Yale Law School, where she would discuss the issues of the day with students who had attended elite colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Her New Orleans education, she recalled, stacked up against theirs and set the stage for her to earn a master's degree in history.
After earning her degree at Yale, McDonald returned to New Orleans and taught history for two years to seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders at Louise S. McGehee School, a prestigious, all-girl preparatory school in the Garden District that has "long catered to the daughters of upper-crust New Orleans," and that today still has ties to many WOS participants and their families. G. William Domhoff, scholar of the power elite in the United States, lists association with the McGehee School as one indicator of upper-class standing. McDonald resigned from her teaching post to start a family with her attorney husband, Roswell King Milling, also born in 1940, who would eventually become president of Whitney National Bank, the famous repository for old money in New Orleans. The Millings, married in 1964, became parents to three sons. As a mother, Milling organized her early volunteer activities around her children's schedules, she told Times-Picayune reporters in 1983. She made great efforts to be home in the afternoon, and she served as a Cub Scout den mother as well as a room mother at the boys' school, Isidore Newman, where one of her sons would become a star quarterback. While her volunteer work in those early years was enabled by having what she called "the luxury of time," she also remarked on how volunteerism pulled her away from the activities that characterized the lives of many wealthy white women of the era: "You can't fix soufflés and gorgeous dinners. Certain things do have to slide."
Charity work was part of Milling's membership in women's social clubs. In 1966 she was invited to join the Junior League of New Orleans, and she accepted with "alacrity." Her participation in the Junior League, she said, taught her "how to organize, have an agenda for every meeting, assess, evaluate, incorporate diversity. All the things that the Junior League teaches you, and you just seem to absorb it into your DNA."
In March 1973 Milling was profiled in an advertisement in the Times-Picayune in conjunction with her recognition as one of "The Beautiful Activists," an annual designation by Germaine Monteil, a cosmetics company, and D. H. Holmes, the New Orleans department store. The ad described Milling as "tall, slim, bright, clear eyed, cheerful, active, busy, unhung up and universally liked" and discussed her many "impressive" contributions to civic life and public service. Also that year, Milling became the first woman appointed to the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board (S&WB). One newspaper article recounts how upon her arrival at her first board meeting, the S&WB president pro tem "showed her to a seat in the audience and said how pleased he was that she came to watch the panel at work." Little did this man know that Milling would be actively participating in that day's meeting and would remain a working board member for the next twelve years, the last two of which were spent in the elected position of president pro tem. By the early 1980s an unnamed "City Hall insider" told Times-Picayune reporters that "Anne is refreshingly active in a pursuit that is not trendy or chic. She's into drainage and sewerage and duking it out with the mayor, instead of running around in pursuit of Chagalls." Whereas some critics described Milling as "very naïve" or out of touch with grassroots politics, as one unnamed leader of a black political organization told reporters, others, "including several city councilmen, say anyone who thinks Milling is not politically astute is only fooled by her blond and breezy facade. Her indifference to politics and personal political agendas, they say, only make her a better advocate." New Orleans councilman Mike Early told the Times-Picayune that Milling possessed a "rare combination of charm and professionalism. She is difficult to say no to."
Fund-raising is a valuable activity and area of specialization for women volunteers, like Milling, involved in philanthropic work. As Arlene Kaplan Daniels writes, "Women who know their city learn how to collect from it so they can redistribute some of the wealth." From 1977 to 1978, Milling served as president of the Junior League of New Orleans, helping to establish the Parenting Center at Children's Hospital. In 1982 she helped raise ninety-five thousand dollars for the Arts Council of New Orleans, and a year later she helped coordinate a black-tie gala fund-raiser, "Seldom Seen: Art from Private Collections." Milling would reign as Queen of the Mystic Club during the 1982 Carnival season, over a decade before her husband was Rex, King of Carnival, in 1993.
Milling was also involved with a number of efforts to feed the hungry, including the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana (an affiliated corporation of the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans) and Feeding America, in addition to working with United Way. Bishop Roger P. Morin of New Orleans said, "Anne was a terrific advocate in terms of acquiring resources — food for poor people, for folks who are unemployed, people falling on hard times." She was also active in supporting residential care facilities for people living with HIV/AIDS. In the late 1980s, Milling helped raise eighty-eight thousand dollars for Project Lazarus, which had been established by the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1985 to offer hospice care to persons living with AIDS. Once limited to cramped quarters in an old convent, the residence house at Project Lazarus was able to expand with these funds. Not only did Milling raise funds for Project Lazarus, but she also spent time there weekly, mopping floors and driving residents to their medical appointments. Unlike civic activities that put her in touch with politicians or the city's cultural elite, volunteer work at Project Lazarus put her in direct contact with one of the most stigmatized groups of that era. Milling remembered being part of the care facility's early history: "I was on the front lines back in the mid-'80s when Lazarus formed and there were only six (hospital) rooms for people with AIDS." This was a period, as Milling described, "back in the '80s when no one was willing to do that." Another New Orleanian, Mark C. Romig, one of the city's most visible civic leaders, made similar observations: "At the time of the disease, it [Project Lazarus] was somewhat, sort of the untouchable organization. Nobody wanted to get involved. And I think Anne Milling showed the way for many, many people to step up and be part of something that was so necessary in our community." Longtime Times-Picayune publisher Ashton Phelps Jr., who led the newspaper during Hurricane Katrina, said, "I've never seen anyone who could lead the biggest events in town and then could also be so one-to-one personal, visiting with a dying person at Lazarus House, or taking care of and consoling somebody when they've just lost a family member." For this work, Milling received Project Lazarus's Guardian Angel Award in 1998, and in 2016 she received the Pawell-Desrosiers Award, given to those who have demonstrated a significant commitment to the organization.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Women Of The Storm"
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