Tayari's Blog: Remembering Jenny Moore

Jenny McKean Moore died in 1973. The night we celebrated her fiftieth birthday -- March 12, 1973 -- she wasn't feeling well -- in 1970, she had survived a near-fatal automobile accident. By April, 1973, she was diagnosed with liver cancer, and by autumn she was dead. What was particularly tragic was that, as she said to me during her final illness, "Everything was just starting."

After having nine children, she published a book, The People on Second Street, in 1968. It was an unsentimental memoir of her life with small children and an Episcopal priest husband in an urban parish in downtown Jersey City during the 1950's, and it was very successful. Also in 1968, she served as the advance woman for Abigail McCarthy in the McCarthy campaign. She had always been a political activist -- especially in the Jersey City days as a partner in my father's ministry -- but 1968 was the year she came into her own as an individual. By the time she became ill, she had published several feature articles in the Washington Post, was working on a play, and taking writing classes at George Washington University (our inspiration for the Jenny Moore program). She had also joined a feminist consciousness raising group in Cleveland Park, the Washington DC neighborhood where she lived, and was about to enter the MFA program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. While she was sick, she began another memoir. When she was no longer able to write, she dictated to a secretary -- childhood memories intertwined with the experience of dying, the sadness of leaving behind nine children between the ages of eleven and twenty-seven.

Now ten years older than she was when she died, I think of my mother as a woman who made the most of the historical advantages which were beginning to emerge for women as a result of the new feminist movement, but also as a woman who lived at the harsh effect of what Betty Friedan christened "the Feminine Mystique". It impresses me now that she read both Friedan and deBeauvoir. She told me The Feminist Mystique had changed her life.

I often wonder what she would be like now: a tall woman, black hair gone nearly white and worn that way as a badge of survival and triumph, dark blue eyes steady out from under her brow, politically active, mad for email (she was always a prodigious correspondent),thinking and talking about women, men, children, grandchildren, cities, books and the scandals of the Bush White House with her particular blend of intelligence, clarity and irony. You should know, too, that she was always a beautiful woman -- 5' 9" with a striking smile.

I remember her saying her forties had been her best years, their chief revelation the importance of friendship. I have no doubt she would by now have formulated a conclusion about her seventies and that I'd get her typical early phone calls dense with impressions of her friends, amazement at the twists lives take, canny speculation about the history and experience of women and men in her generation, and a full head of steam for the decade ahead.

-Honor Moore