Feminism may not be dead, but it wasn't born yesterday

Hey guys, Cheyenne here.
I'm the second part of this collaborative blog.

I'm currently living in New York, and I see a lot of injustices every day just walking around Manhattan, none the less in other boroughs. While I could go on for hours about myself, I'm not here today to talk about me...I do that enough every day ;)

I do, however, want to talk about a woman that is very near and dear to my heart. In my opinion she was at the forefront of feminism. She helped raise me, and taught me some of the most important life lessons. Who is this person you might ask. Her name is Marjorie Lockhart, my and Ashley's grandmother, she was one of the most amazing women I have ever met.

Marjorie Lockart, or grandma as I liked to call her, was an extraordinary woman for many reasons. However I want to focus on only a few. My grandma overcame a great deal of obsticals in her life. When she was young as well as when she grew to have a family and became a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.

Born on Valentines day in 1926 in the middle of a blizzard, she didn't have the easiest start in life. She was born and raised in, not kidding here, Farmland IN. Sounds like fun right?

Born to a minister and raised in the church, she was no stranger to the societal constraints and restrictions that were put on women during that time. Well when she graduated from high school, she ended up in Chicago IL where she met and married her husband. In her prime she started working, which was a rarity to see at all in the mid-century 1900's. She held several jobs including working for the school board. She went to families of children who were stricken by poverty and helped them get the resources needed to go to school, among other things. She was head of the school board, and worked to help support her family.

While she was working a truly tough work schedule filled with long days and nights, she was still raising five beautiful children. But, one day a tragedy struck her family. Her son was in an accident rendering him helplessly trapped in a coma for months on end. For all of those months she would stay at the hospital with him and pray for his recovery, while still working and raising her other children. When the youngest of the five children, my mother, graduated high school and was old enough to mover out of the house, my grandfather was offered a job in Saudi Arabia.

So what does my grandma do?
She packs up, and moves across the world of course! They headed east, and didn't look back. While she was overseas she didn't just stick to the country where her husband worked, no, she went to Thailand, France, England, and Germany (just to name a few). When all of the social norms were telling her to stay home and cook dinner she went out and explored the world. She genuinely made the most of life, and jumped in feet first.

When she returned to the states she eventually (when her husband passed away) moved to TN, bought a house, and made every attempt to live her life to the fullest. She went on cruises and vacations with friends, and family.

She looked after her grandchildren, and traveled around the country to spent time with the one's she loved.

Then I came into the picture. Some of my fondest memories are of being at her house, stealing her slimfast, and just spending time with her. When I was young, my grandma moved from Tennessee to South Carolina to help my mom take care of my brother, sister, and me. She watched us after school and tried, unsuccessfully might I add, to teach us her hobbies. I vividly remember her teaching me how to cross stitch, paint, and play scrabble. She would read me poetry by William Blake and Shakespeare...too bad my lack of attention made her efforts futile.

In 2004 my grandmother had a horrible stroke that damaged the section of her brain that controlled her motor skills and landed her in the hospital for about two months, followed by rehabilitation to strengthen her motor skills. When she was finally released she moved in with my family, and spent the next and final years of her life inadvertently teaching me some of the most important lessons in life.

Marjorie Lockhart was a woman that faced the world head on and said f-you to the typical standards that women were held to. She went out into thew world to provide for her family when it wasn't the "thing to do". She truly was an incredible woman, and she instilled the idea of independence in me, if not all of her children and grandchildren.