Minta: More Than a Photo to Me

Today, I’m sharing my great great grandmother Armintha Leah Meadows Holliday, known as “Minta”.  She was my great great grandmother.  She lived her entire life in West Virginia, born in 1871 and passing away in 1927.  I love that I have a photograph of her, it hangs in my dining room.  I often gaze at her while I’m doing stuff around the house.  I “talk” to her, I ask her questions “how did you do it?  Was being a mother hard for you too?”  Her presence in my home is a comfort to me.  I know that she successfully raised my great grandfather to be a strong, successful, and loving man.  He in turn raised my grandmother to be a loving, hard working, Dallas- loving, solitaire playing woman who I remember warmly, and she in turn raised my dad- a man whom has given me nothing but love and humble guidance my entire life.  I know that Minta walked this Earth and left it a better place and that is what I want.  Someday I hope my grandchildren and great grandchildren feel the way about me I do about Minta.

Minta was born right after the end of the Civil War.  West Virginia was a new state and there is no doubt that life was hard in those days.  I don’t know anything about her childhood, but I imagine it involved physical farm labor of some sort. She married William David Holliday and together they had 3 children, two sons and a daughter.  My great grandfather was the middle child and the older son.  Her daughter was named Carrie and family legend has it that she was a “flapper”.

According to the Cambridge dictionary a flapper is defined as “In the 1920s a fashionable young woman, especially one showing independent behavior.”  The cultural phenomena of flappers is explainable as a reaction to the horrors of WWI and the 1918 Flu epidemic that followed on the War’s heels.  Unimaginable death and suffering was heaped upon a generation of young people and their rebellion and assertion of independence is not surprising.

Carrie would’ve witnessed her younger brother (my great grandfather) go off to fight in France (and thankfully return home), and most likely experienced the loss of a friend or boyfriend in the war.  There’s no way for me to know how Minta felt about Carrie being a flapper.  I can’t even begin to guess.  But I do know that Minta and Carrie both were alive when the 19th amendment was passed.  Both women, one young and one middle aged were now able to vote and participate fully in American political life.  I’m sure that Carrie exercised her right, her flapper status pretty much guarantees that!  I don’t know if Minta ever voted, I have a feeling she did though.

When I think about my life and the gifts it has given me I think about all the women who came before me, would Minta have lived a different life if she had had the same opportunities as me?  What sort of person would I be without the choices that I have had as a women coming of age in the 21st century.  To me being a women is about choices.  It is about the gift we now have as women to make our own choices.  We are free to be whatever we want to be, unlike Minta.  Regardless of whether or not Minta was living the life she dreamed of, it was the only choice she had.   Women of my generation are allowed to have dreams and choices that women of Minta’s generation dared only to dream about.  Minta- I hope you are proud of the woman I chose to be, I hope you are smiling down on me and all your other great great granddaughters (and great great great granddaughters too) as we navigate this world.