Grandma Magic Podcast Episode 12: Shirley Showalter, Grandma for Love
Shirley Showalter, a devoted mother and proud grandmother, is not only a lifelong educator but also an accomplished author. She previously served as the president of Goshen College in Indiana and held an executive position at the Fetzer Institute. In this episode, we delve into her remarkable journey towards political engagement and the inspiring Grandmas for Love movement, which passionately champions the integrity of local school boards in her hometown of Lititz, Pennsylvania. Shirley sheds light on the enduring values that underscore the importance of maintaining the separation of church and state, emphasizing how peaceful protest fueled by love remains a profoundly radical and transformative endeavor.
To learn more about the work Shirley and her community are doing at Grandmas for Love, visit https://grandmasforlove.com/.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Welcome to Grandma Magic, a podcast from the Grandmother Collective. We are a non profit organization that supports and advocates for a world where a grandmother’s power is seen, cultivated, and activated for positive change. The Grandma Magic Podcast is an opportunity to learn more about the unique positions that grandmothers, aunties, and other older women around the world can play in advancing positive social development by talking to and learning from grandmother changemakers.
We hope this series inspires you, brings you joy, and helps you recognize the enduring magic and wisdom that comes from grandmothers everywhere. My name is Lynsey Farrell and I’m your host. Today I’m joined by Shirley Showalter. Born on a farm near Lititz, Pennsylvania, Shirley’s journey has woven through teaching, academic leadership, and her role as a grandparent.
She spent most of her career as a professor and then president of Goshen College, and then pivoted to an executive role at the Fetzer Institute, an organization with a mission to provide a spiritual foundation for a loving world. She has since become a full time writer and activist. She published a memoir on growing up Mennonite, and her most recent book is The Mindful Grandparent.
We first connected because Shirley has been working with grandmothers in her community around an initiative called Grandmothers for Love, a local response to the recent conflict over books, equity, and parental rights in education across the country. And I’m so looking forward to digging in today. Thank you for joining us.
Shirley Showalter: Well, thank you for having me. I’m thrilled too, because I have been listening to this podcast and following you on Instagram and see a huge overlap between our missions.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yes, definitely. So Shirley, one of the things that we love to start with is, you know, we find that you might not have had a grandmother, but you had a grandmother figure in your life that kind of ends up being an inspiration or provided a foundation. Do you have a figure like that in your life that you wanna share about?
Shirley Showalter: I certainly do. When I did the memoir and then later on when I wrote the book about mindful grandparenting, which is part memoiristic, I certainly began to reflect on my own grandparenting experience when I was a child. I had a grandma, Hess, who was my mother’s mother and I only had her for three years, but she left an indelible impression on me, mostly because she left an indelible impression on my mother.
I don’t have many memories of her. I don’t remember sitting on her lap or even having meals. My mother talks about how she would bring gifts. I think she gave me a little red wagon and a little tricycle. So, she was generous and she was also extroverted and very well suited to the role she had as the Chief Seller on the central market stand that my grandparents had.
During the depression I’m not sure how they would have gotten through without the ability to sell direct to the public, the fruits of their labors from the fields, and to create a lot of friendships with often other women in the marketplace. So my mother tells the story of how after my grandmother’s sudden death one of the clients of the market stand said to my mother, “Oh, your mother was so wonderful. You’re okay too, but she was great.”
And that comparison seemed to stick, but my mother actually agreed with that. She often describes my grandmother as having a wonderful personality. A very attractive personality, someone who could influence others. And who made things happen. I had a grandmother on the other side who was much more quiet, but also very skillful.
Her skill was in being a peacemaker. She had a husband who was much more vivacious and had a few conflicts in the world and she was the one who would be able to reach out and patch up any conflicts that were in the family or in the church or in any other group they were part of. And she used her hands to serve.
And so, on the one hand I have a grandma who was a go getter and someone who made things happen. On the other hand, I have a really strong figure of service orientation. To serve the community, to serve the family, to serve her church. And those two women, and my second grandmother, grandma Hershey, lived quite a while into my childhood and even my early adulthood. So I could see her operating in the world firsthand.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. You know, you had written a memoir. So first I wanna understand the sort of inspiration to go about and write a memoir, but also as you reflect, that seems really daunting and overwhelming to me to reflect on a past in such a way, and so trying to understand why you wanted to do that.
But I think, you know, you’re starting to tease out that your own inclination towards service or your own inclination towards action, that foundation was within your family, within your upbringing.
Shirley Showalter: I studied Willa Cather’s writing very intensely when I did my dissertation. And one of the things she said was that, “Every person has had experiences by the age of 15 that is going to form them for the rest of their lives.”
And so that’s why I wrote a childhood memoir. And I must say, Lynsey, when I was your age I would never have thought I would write a memoir either.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It’s like, who cares about my life?
Shirley Showalter: Yeah. Right. But I would often get asked the question like, “Well, how did you get to be a college president from growing up on the farm and growing up Mennonite?”
And that question was, one that was interesting to me, especially combined with Willa Cather saying, “We are formed in our childhoods and if you want to really understand the rest of how someone operates in the world, in their lives, you better understand their childhood.”
One of my other favorite podcasts is Krista Tippett’s On Being. And she begins almost every one of her interviews with the question “What was the spiritual background of your childhood?”
And she gives people permission to define spiritual in the broadest possible ways. But like Willa Cather, she seems to believe that these formative experiences, these formative relationships are very high on the explanation list for what we do with our lives.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): When I worked at Ashoka, which is this giant global network of social innovators, they would really dig, dig deep into people’s, personal background as a way of trying to understand that inclination towards change making.
And it was very much that, you know, you could pinpoint a period of time when you were nine, ten, eleven, when you realized that you had the capacity and autonomy and decision making and the change making ability to do something in the world. And we actually incorporated into our interviews for staff members as well.
And that has really stuck with me. And so that’s actually kind of why I asked this question to you, too. What were those for you?
Shirley Showalter: Well, I’m a firstborn for one thing, and so that’s going to naturally —
Lynsey Farrell (Host): First born in a farm community as a Mennonite. Yes, you were doing things that– you had responsibilities I imagine.
Shirley Showalter: I was a busy little girl. And I only discovered this by writing the memoir, I am the only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter. And this is like concentrated maternal energy, especially when among Mennonites and among farmers people would, you know, have families of ten or more children, so that you almost never got this only position.
But I was an only daughter only at the beginning of my childhood. My brother came next and then I had a little baby sister who died after 39 days. Which was a searing experience for our entire family. And then I have three other sisters, so I can’t say I’m the only daughter now and certainly share that experience with my sisters, but we have a 96 and a half year old mother who has loved us all very well and while she was a young mother, 21 years old when I was born, she also had her very vivacious and capacious mother who died of a heart attack at age 53. And so that was that period of time, that was three years, well actually later on five years, but three years when there were three generations of only daughters.
And so my grandmother was evidently very excited and involved in supporting my mother and my mother grieved her loss all her life. But we’re very glad that she’s also a survivor and a fighter and she is now my role model for what I want to be when I grow up.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): 96, did you say 96?
Shirley Showalter: Yes 96 and a half. We start counting halves.
And what I admire most about my mother is her devotion to love within our family. We do not all think alike politically. We do not all go to the same church. We are not uniform, but we are uniformly loved. And we all know that it is my mother’s most ardent wish that we support and love each other. And that along with the fact that she’s just jolly. She doesn’t let her little aches and pains get her down. When you call and say, “Mom, it’s Sunday. We’re going to take you out for lunch” she gets all excited and that’s really what I want to emulate.
Another thing about my mother is that when she lost this baby due to a congenital heart condition, she and other mothers formed an organization, I think they called themselves the Home Builders. And they looked in the newspaper to see the names of mothers who lost children. And they formed an organization to send material of comfort to the grieving.
And it was the way she overcame her own grief. And I think that probably was one of the other influences in my own life. Even though my mother is not college educated, she was not a professional, but she is a storyteller and she is a reader and a learner, and she used her experience of grief to help other people.
And that has influenced me a great deal.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, she just took action, but Ashoka is working on this called spiritual change making, and they talk about it as respect and love and action. And that sounds like really what you’ve gleaned from that and to be honest, as I’m looking at your life, even the decisions of the institutions that you have participated in have really been in that vein of thinking.
Shirley Showalter: I’ve been fortunate in being able to live my highest values through my work.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So, I want to hear about this book that you wrote, the most recent book that you were supposed to have started to really promote, I think last year or this year, called The Mindful Grandparenting. So I’m sure you hear this all the time too, that so many grandmothers, grandfathers, and today’s hyper political, divisive, strangely, modern parenting, haven’t figured out the role that they should be playing.
Is that what was one of your inspirations? What launched The Mindful Grandparenting?
Shirley Showalter: Well, it was actually probably more out of love and joy than it was out of a perceived need. I have really enjoyed grandparenting and I had heard from other grandparents how wonderful it was, but then when it happened to me I thought that this was a kind of culmination of all of my interests in family, spirituality, and also I had a good friend whose name is Marilyn McIntyre and she is on the other coast and she and I have very similar values. She has nine grandchildren and she has written more books than I have. I think this was her 21st book and both of us were English professors. So our book is sprinkled with literary references and allusions. And it’s also sprinkled with our own experiences as grandparents. I think, to go to your question about the understanding what parenting is like today, it certainly is a more complex circumstance than even our own were, but I’m a first generation, two career family person, and one of my motivations for being very involved in grandchildren’s lives is that we did not have the benefit of grandparents around us. We lived 600 miles away from both sets of grandparents and those grandparents had a different model of grandparenting. Even had we lived closer, I don’t think we would’ve had them say, “Oh, bring the children over Friday night and have them stay over and we’ll keep them part of the weekend.”
They had raised their children. They didn’t get as actively involved in any of my siblings’ children’s lives as I am currently involved and many of my siblings are currently involved in their grandchildren’s lives. Partly, it’s a matter of size. I only have three grandchildren and it’s easier to really concentrate your energies on three rather than 16 or 20 or a very, very large group. Some grandparents have, but Marilyn and I really enjoyed the conversation that took place as we wrote the book so that we were teaching each other and learning from each other.
And of course it was all during COVID. So COVID has influenced some of the chapter titles, it has influenced certainly the way that we chose to focus the book, even though it’s much bigger and broader than a pandemic. But one of the things we did observe, and you rightly point out, is that parenting philosophies have changed a lot. And, it works very well for you to understand what your children have selected as their method of parenting so that you can adjust your grandparenting style to their parenting style. One of the things we both agree on is that the parents have the right to be the chief philosophers of the relationship.
And they have resources and access to all kinds of books. You know, we had maybe one parenting guide, Dr. Spock, and it was something you use more like an encyclopedia rather than immersing yourself in a philosophy or a set of ideas and practices. Now I think with the gentle parenting movement, the attachment parenting, the movement away from any kind of physical coercion to understanding feelings and emotions. I admire that. Sometimes, I would prefer to be a little more direct. But, we don’t have any major conflicts over style and we really do — mostly what we want to do is not undermine the rules and philosophy of our children. And that’s worked out very well.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): You know we talk a lot about grandmothers having a specific social role, not just family role. So I think there have been incredible shifts in family structure and maybe dynamics and shifts in hierarchies and things like that. But grandmothers have always been the trusted person, the secret keeper. Somebody in a role that despite all these changes in philosophy is like in the family have remained, but in society people go, “Oh, this makes so much sense.”
Obviously you have all these women that are so capable, knowledgeable, but trusted and loved. That can play a particular role in social change. So I wonder if you can tell us more about, I think, the way that you’re harnessing that.
Shirley Showalter: You may be aware of the fact that I got involved at my local school board level, which is my current social activism.
Because we had experienced influence from the right wing in our local school district and this is a school from which I graduated in 1966. So I have a vested interest in it.
When I came back I had no idea that I would get involved in school board politics at the local public school. It would have been the last thing I had anticipated. Until I began to read about how the school board has become a kind of nexus for the polarization and political pressure, especially during COVID and thereafter.
So, I got involved and then recognized that one of those right leaning groups is called Moms for Liberty. And learning about them and eventually attending their national summit in Philadelphia, I heard them use allusions to the animal kingdom. “Mama bear.” These are people very determined to protect their parental rights. “We do not co parent with the government” is one of their favorite phrases. And they want to make the schools safer for their values and are less concerned about the diverse needs of other parents in the school district. When they talked about themselves as “mama bears” I began to think about something I recalled reading, and I’m sure you know about this grandmother hypothesis.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yes, I do.
Shirley Showalter: Because it’s perfect for us and it demonstrates the specific role that the fact that human beings lived beyond the time when they were reproductively able. And that meant that grandmas hung around for years while their daughters were having young and those grandmothers could help to rear the babies.
That happened among the humanoids. That happened in our species. I don’t know if it’s an absolute proven truth of evolutionary biology or not, but I think it has a lot of credibility in the biological world, because there is evidence of length and lifespan. So, exactly how the grandmothers used that lifespan, I’m sure, we don’t know exactly how that happened, but one of the things we do know about the animal world today is that there are very few instances of animals who live past childbearing years. One of which is an orca and the other of which is the elephant.
And so our group read the book about elephants in charge, grandma elephants in charge, and it came from a biologist who was sharing all kinds of interesting facts about grandma elephants. The role that they play, the memory they have. You know, we hear about elephants have these great memories. Well, the elephant that has the best memory is the grandmother who leads the whole group to good watering holes, to places where they have been free of predators, and therefore the grandmother elephant has this important role to play.
So, one of our artists made us a grandma elephant reading a book to a sweet little elephant grandchild and having brightly painted rainbow toenails. So, it has helped us say in one image what we believe in and the love, the loving through reading books, and the love of inclusiveness as represented by those toenails.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): You know, what I find interesting about your story is you’re talking about a part of Pennsylvania that has been relatively conservative. This isn’t a place where —
Shirley Showalter: You’re relatively doesn’t need to be added.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It has been conservative. It’s been conservative. And given your upbringing and the work that you’ve done, you know, you’re not a radical left wing, crazy person. I mean this is really about bringing back some moderate to moderate, non partisan, non political space to our education.
Is that right?
Shirley Showalter: That’s exactly right. And when a group of people gains control of the party apparatus and no longer speaks about wishing to be nonpartisan, wishing to represent everyone and speaks only about pornography in the schools and other things that they imagine are injuring their children. When that happens, then the interesting thing to me is that though we live in a conservative area, we live also in an area of very strong moral values that are also values that we need for equity and inclusion and diversity. We need to understand love and I am grateful to my tradition.
I am still a Mennonite and my church is supporting me in the work that I’m doing, because there has been an emphasis on love. Mennonites have been pacifists since 1525 and they have kept a very minority, but strong position of speaking for love against war and for peace. So I see myself as standing right in the middle of that tradition, even though it can look very conservative and sometimes it’s conservative.
Pieces of me are conservative. I’m conservative financially. I’m conservative when it comes to change that could be harmful and try to understand the other side as much as I possibly can, but I also am willing to stand up on behalf of those who are not able to speak. And that sometimes doesn’t look conservative. That looks a little more radical and I got that, I got the radical in my tradition too. So.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, you do.
Shirley Showalter: It was called the Radical Reformation for a reason. And thousands of them were killed for a reason. They were kind of the original church-state separators. They saw the dangers when the state holds the sword, and the church then feels the brunt of that sword. That’s no longer by my estimation and my forebearer’s estimation what Jesus had in mind.
And so there’s been a combination of conservative and radical in myself, in my religious community, in my community in general. I’m convinced that while Warwick School District is conservative and has never had a Democrat on the school board, it has also never had radical right leaning people on the school board.
All the school board members that I recall took nonpartisanship very seriously. And whether they were Republican or Democrats, I expected to come be ruled by Republicans and if they were the kind that we had on our bulletin board when I was growing up, Mamie and Ike, that was going to be just fine with me.
I would be very happy. In fact, our current school board is made up of what you might call moderate Republicans and they have not done any great damage, but what we’re trying to do is to prevent a right wing takeover.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Which has happened in lots of communities around the country.
Shirley Showalter: Right. We know what the playbook is. We’ve seen it before. And that’s why we got together. We started to talk to each other about this.
Our first tactic was to say, what could we do? And the first action we took was a full page ad during the primaries, which progressive people here have used that methodology to get the message out of nonpartisanship, to get the message out of the dangers of Christian nationalism and people have been willing to put their names and their money on line so that their neighbors can see what they believe.
And we started by doing that now on our website, which is grandmasforlove.com. You can go there and see a little video of the language we used in our website. Who we are, what we believe in, why we’re concerned, what we want. And with the help of somebody who knows a lot more about social media than I do, we have a sweet little website and I think it helps bring people into awareness of what we’re doing.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And so what are some of your other approaches? Why grandmas? Why love?
Shirley Showalter: Well, obviously, when there is a national organization funded by very conservative donors called Moms for Liberty, in addition to this image of the mama bear protecting her young, we have the apple pie imagery of moms. They can never be for anything bad, right? They’re always pure and good.
So, in the use of the mom name, they are aligning themselves with people’s positive images of mothers. And we have very positive images of mothers as well, because you don’t get to be a grandma unless you have been a mother first.
And we’re still mothers. So we share that. I mean, I am sure that I would hold many things in common with many of the Moms for Liberty. But we also have some pretty significant differences, and that’s what we wanted to do, to draw attention, use perhaps and even more, not exactly holy, but positive image. If moms are milk and cookies, grandmas are —
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Warm hugs and, uh,
Shirley Showalter: Right.
And you know, kids will often say that grandmas are the place you go if you really want to have an understanding. And we believe that our love for our own grandchildren translates into love for our community’s children and love for the next generation. We are getting ready to move off this mortal coil and we know that the time ahead of us is much shorter than the time behind us. So we have a kind of fearsomeness, fierceness that comes from knowing that we have very little to lose and we have a lot to gain by sharing our love with the community and calling on other grandmothers to go beyond just loving and caring for their immediate grandchildren, but for the whole community, for our country.
The statistics on children in poverty are just really appalling in a rich nation. It should not be. And schools are one of the places where those children can have some semblance of equity. If they can get food, if they have loving teachers, it’s so important and we care about all of them.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, you know, we have a couple projects that we’ve been working on with grandmother groups, one in Chicago, another in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia. And the school, I think in both instances, the school for the grandmothers has always been such a community center. And so to protect it and to be involved in what’s happening in schools seems very obvious. It’s a place where you rem — if it’s your school you remember it, you remember what it felt like, and you want that to be the space. And I live in Philadelphia not very far from you. And last week one of my friends at a local school here where we’re all trying to put our kids in the public schools and be part of our neighborhood and really connect and be part of this in places where people have been abandoning schools. So it was a group of us that are really focused and connected to putting our kids in the school system and they had a lockdown because there was a carjacking outside of one of the schools last week and you start to think this is not the safe space.
And it’s not just things like that, it’s the general safe space of this is a place where I know my kid will be accepted for anything that they are,
Shirley Showalter: And that’s why public schools are very important. They are like the common green of the old village where people come together and share and administer the needs of the town.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It’s also kind of an equalizing space, right? It should be an equalizing space.
Shirley Showalter: One of the things I learned by the fact that I now go out and talk to other groups, is that here in Lancaster we have another radical historical figure that we need to help spread the word about. And that is Thaddeus Stevens, radical Republican from the 1830s, who basically was the founder of public schools and the great defender of them when they were going down in the legislature and he gave a — stood up and gave a speech about how privileged people warm to their children’s education and imagine that their children have earned everything they have.
But he knows from growing up in poverty and from growing up with a clubfoot and being bullied in the educational system that there was inequity already and they needed a strong base that would equalize as much as possible. You’re still going to have kids that come from loving homes, kids who come from middle class means are going to have advantages, privileges that students who lack those things may not have. But he gave this amazing speech in the Pennsylvania legislature. He called upon his fellow legislators to be philosophers. Can you imagine? He was a radical Republican and he described how the privileged view education and he concluded his speech by he thanked God every day that he had been given the privilege of growing up poor.
And I want to learn a great deal more about not only this speech, but he was way ahead of his time on race issues. He was way ahead of his time. And we think of Lancaster County as just being so conservative. And yet here was this flaming radical abolitionist in our midst, and not only did he speak out about slavery and about race, and is buried with, I believe this is true, buried in Lancaster with black citizens who would not have been allowed to be in other graveyards.
I believe that’s true. Somebody should fact check me on it, but that would be true to his values and he is a wonderful progenitor and that kind of passion for the public school is missing in the conversation today. And we hope to bring some of it back in.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation. You’re exactly the kind of proof that grandmothers are gonna, you know, maybe save the world or something. Something that we say a lot, kind of in jest, but not really.
Shirley Showalter: Not really.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): We sort of say it in jest, but not really. That we really believe that with grandmother magic and grandma power, that we really can make some significant strides.
So, in a closing, can you share maybe something that you’re really looking forward to or that you’re hopeful about from this work that you’ve been doing or what you’re seeing in the world of change making.
Shirley Showalter: Well, we’re very focused right now on these last weeks before November 7th. So, what gives us hope with regards to the election, especially since there are seven people running for office and there has never been one Democrat elected in the past.
So in order to prevent a takeover, you would need to have four or five Democrats elected, and I would call that a miracle. And so what we are doing is working for a miracle. And we may or may not see the result of our labor in the immediate results of the election. But we hope we will have planted a flag for love and that might moderate the actions of our friends, the Republicans, should they be the ones elected. And give them reason to not get out ahead of the rest of the community in their desire to bring their moral fervor to bear on how the school should be run. So, we don’t think there’s a way we will lose a hundred percent. We think it will be a miracle if we were to win, but we have seen other miracles transpire.
And if you live long enough, which is one of the benefits of being a grandma, you know that it can happen. So we’re going to do our best to see if we can produce a miracle.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, good luck. I will be rooting for you.
Shirley Showalter: Thank you very much.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And thank you again for taking the time to share your life, your stories, your memories, and I’m sure have inspired others.
Shirley Showalter: Thank you.
