At 18, "Ana" Marie Isis Graham filed to have her name legally changed, dropping the Graham and moving her middle name to replace it. Ana Marie Isis; this was her name now. She would no longer be branded with her father's identity or bound to those associations. She would be her own origin; her own creation.
At age 5, Ana discovered she was craftier than her mother, and she needed only swallow her pride to get what she wanted. She allowed Isadore to believe she was in control of her daughter. She played along, looked foolish and feigned apology when necessary. She got scolded and punished like every other child her age, but it never changed her opinion or altered her actions. She would not be imprinted.
She would never subjugate her actions;…show more content… She taught herself to read by throwing herself in her father's lap whenever he read the paper. He sought privacy and silence after dinner, but she would never grant it to him until after he read an article or two, forcing him to annunciate the syllables and define the words she didn't know.
Eventually, she started hanging out at the library and developed a taste for rare books and documents. She made friends with the older, educated townsfolk and often talked history with them. They were always taken aback by her frankness and eloquence, but once they warmed up to her, they conversed as if she were an adult.
Ana seemed to connect with older people. She would make friends, usually 3 or 4 years older than her, and bring them home unannounced. When her mother found them playing in the backyard, she initially expressed concern, however, it was unwarranted as Ana was always clearly in control of whatever they did. Whenever she expressed that "Maybe it's a bad idea for you to be playing with older girls," Ana always came back with a response that was simple and clever and reassuring. "You remember Miss Clague from the cannery? This is her daughter, Harriet. We met by the…show more content… Whereas most people viewed famous and intelligent women as symbols of female empowerment, Ana saw them as the true source of inequality. [Not all women, mind you, just the ones that played by the rules.] In trying to win the approval of society, these women accidentally perpetuated the stereotype of subservience… but instead of answering to a husband, they are answering to an entire social structure. They are simply replacing their oppressor.
To her, the problem of inequality had nothing to do with gender, but dependence. Those who publicly tried to prove their independence were the most dependent on the opinion of others. A confident woman is herself without apology. A confident woman can be completely invisible. She doesn’t care what conclusion you draw of her because she will not change to accommodate you.
These are things that Ana knew instinctively at her age, but she still didn't know who Marie Curie was.
Whenever she met somebody new, child or adult, Marie would introduce herself as Ana, and each person would call her "Ana" in complete sincerity. Eventually, her mother became exhausted of the embarrassment of correcting them and she took to calling her "Ana" herself as a joke. In time, it naturally
