Hannah Davis Foster, Cedar City's Pioneer Woman Activist:
Helen Foster Snow's Mother and Role Model

Karen E. Hyer, Ph.D., J.D.
Women's Research Institute
Brigham Young University
 

Helen Foster Snow was clearly a product of her family and her childhood years in Utah.  These early years were the foundation that gave Helen the knowledge and experience to reach out and assist the Chinese people in the dark days of the Japanese oppression in the decade prior to World War II. Helen's high energy and emphasis on action especially reflected the influence of her mother, Cedar City resident Hannah Davis Foster, an intelligent, attractive, competent, and energetic woman who was the daughter of pioneers.  Hannah had learned from an early age the techniques of survival in a wilderness area.  These are the skills that Hannah taught Helen and Helen later used in China's countryside when the Chinese were struggling for survival against a brutal Japanese invasion.
Hannah Foster's Influence on Her Daughter
The depth and enduring nature of Hannah's influence on her daughter's earliest ideas and dreams was profound.  Helen's autobiographical notes indicate that her mother was proud of her family roots and taught Helen that she descended from noble ancestors and important people in Great Britain.  Hannah started Helen on her interest in family history by having her interview her relatives and document those comments with These were the skills that were to be so useful to Helen as she developed her journalistic career.
Practical Survival Skills
Hannah taught Helen practical survival skills by taking her camping in the rugged Utah mountains surrounding Cedar City, teaching her to fish in the cold swift mountain streams and the slower streams by the farms, pointing out the facts of nature.  Hannah also taught Helen the importance of documenting her own personal history by writing about her experiences and taking photographs to substantiate her writings.  When Helen was leaving for China, it was Hannah who gave her the camera she used to record the faces of the many young leaders and student soldiers she interviewed in the burgeoning Chinese Communist movements she studied and observed.  Helen's photographic documentation remains one of the most valuable records of this troubled and important time in history for the Chinese people and the world.
Ability to Work Hard and Complete Tasks   
Helen observed how her mother started and succeeded in finishing many projects, from small enterprises to help support the family to large public projects to benefit the community of Cedar City or to advance national women's issues such as voting rights.  As the oldest child, Helen assisted her mother in household and farm chores, in care of her younger siblings, and in the egg business that helped feed the family.  She also observed how her mother administered the many welfare projects that were Hannah Foster's responsibilities as President of the Primary and later the Relief Society organizations in the Cedar City Mormon Church.  These interests and capabilities learned from her mother became the core characteristics of Helen throughout her long life, before she went to China, during her years there, and after she returned to her home in Connecticut.
Helen wrote that her father was her intellectual role model, but she actually emulated the behavior, interests, philosophy and intellectual interests of her activist mother.  Hannah Davis was academically accomplished from her earliest grade school days. An important life-long characteristic of Hannah Davis was her willingness and ability to take charge and to take responsibility. As a young woman, Hannah Davis taught at both Ricks College in Idaho and the Branch Normal School  at Cedar City, Utah (now Southern Utah University).  From her earliest years, Hannah was known to be outgoing, congenial and a "take charge" type of person.
In contrast, Helen's father, John Moody Foster, was Cedar City's and Iron County's much appreciated attorney for many years.  he was quiet and pensive, provided legal services to the poor, but was neither ambitious nor energetic in a time when his Stanford connections could have helped him rise in his profession.  Helen may have psychologically identified with her aloof father, who she saw as an intellectual, but she was very much like her practical and entrepreneurial mother.  Hannah Davis Foster was a beautiful, vivacious, hardworking, goal-oriented woman, proud of her ancestry and inborn capabilities.  In a day when many talented women were lost in the shadows of their husbands, fathers, and brothers, Helen learned from her mother to stand on her own two feet, to set and accomplish goals, to not let problems deter her, and to find great purpose and satisfaction in charitable work.  Her mother taught her to have a "can do" attitude, to take what comes without complaint and to believe that she could accomplish her goals.
Compassion and Charity
Hannah Davis Foster taught her daughter the importance of reaching out to others, in order to help make the world a better place. Helen's mother was interested in children and youth, the weak and powerless of the community. She devoted many years of her life to leadership of community and church efforts to improve conditions for children and the needy. Helen also was interested in the weak and powerless of society, especially those who had been oppressed by traditional cultural conditions. Helen's love for and service to the Chinese people was an example of her mother's early influence and the pervasive influence of the Mormon Church and the Cedar City community which surrounded her.  
Similarities between Mother and Daughter 
Helen's mother was a pioneer who knew the dangers of living in relative wilderness and the necessity of using ingenuity and hard work to survive.  As a small child, Hannah Davis lived in rustic rural circumstances and helped her parents clear raw land for cultivation. A generation later, Helen also experienced pioneering when she helped her mother and father clear land and start farming. Hannah helped her parents run a small remote country store and eventually became their bookkeeper.  Helen developed a sense of responsibility and caring when she helped her mother take care of her younger twin brothers and assisted in her mother's chicken business. Helen was not a stranger to hard work. Her own experience on a working farm gave her an empathetic understanding of the daily toil of the rural worker.
Helen was a different type of pioneer when she left the relative comfort, safety and stability of the United States in 1931 to go to an exotic world of clashing cultures, intrigue, unrest and danger. Helen's early life with her mother on the farm and the values that her mother taught her enabled her to work in the Chinese countryside without complaint.  Helen was not the typical urban American intellectual woman of her day.  She was a product of a raw western America, and specifically Utah, where she had been taught to respect and emulate her pioneer heritage of hard work and cooperation.
Helen and her mother were similar in a number of ways.  Both women were willing to try new things and were not easily discouraged. Both could deal with challenge and danger. Both were modern women in their own context of history.  The mother instilled in the daughter a respect for her ancestors and their accomplishments and a certain deep feeling that their ancestry gave them a genetic advantage in terms of intelligence. The mother also provided a role model of an involved, upstanding citizen, someone for youth to emulate.  Helen was taught early to "remember who she was" and to act accordingly. Both Hannah and Helen felt integrity and virtue were important character traits that should never be compromised.  
 Helen's mother was a community activist and early participant in the United States women's voting rights movement, riding on the women's suffrage float as the representative of Utah in the 1910 Fourth of July Parade in Chicago. While Utah women were the some of the first in the United States to vote, in other parts of the country this was not a popular idea with the male voters. Like her mother, Helen was also present during the beginnings of social change: a massive revolution that eventually changed the course of history for a fourth of the world's people and impacted the rest of the world.
While Helen's mother pioneered in setting up playgrounds, working with youth and obtaining voting rights for women, Helen pioneered in focusing journalistic attention on the Chinese common people and on bridging the information gap between two distant and very different lands, China and the United States. Like her well-known contemporary, author Studs Terkel, Helen sought to interview the people who were doing the work-- the common soldiers and their families. Today, we think nothing of viewing women correspondents on the television news reporting from the midst of combat zones.   Helen Foster Snow was one of the first of her kind, braving danger and privation in the midst of war, to report on an important story.   She was one of the first female war correspondents.
It was Helen Snow's pioneering work among the common people that enabled her to assist her husband, the foreign correspondent Edgar Snow, to analyze and realize that the Chinese Communist movement had large popular support in the countryside. While other journalists were concentrating on the Nationalists and the leaders in the cities, Helen was traveling by any conveyance she could arrange and trekking into the dangerous countryside to meet with the people and interview them. She collected volumes of notes and intended to write her own articles and books on the rise of Mao and The People's Republic of China.  The desire to produce her own writings and to become a well-known author in her own right probably contributed to tension with her husband, Edgar Snow, especially after he took full credit for their joint efforts on his famous book Red Star Over China, a book that some thought would not have been written without Helen's extensive prodding, assistance and editing.
Positive Results from Disappointment
Helen had seen her talented mother subordinate her educational interests as well as her own inherited wealth and earned resources to her father's whims and desire to change occupations on at least three major occasions that left the family in difficult circumstances. Even though Helen was concerned with making a name for herself, she maintained that in school she always wanted to be "vice president" rather than president, so she could exercise influence to accomplish project goals.  This attitude was undoubtedly an artifact of the times in which she lived where women were struggling for fair treatment, were routinely denied leadership positions in companies and public entities, and thought they could exert influence only through their beauty and wiles.   But she may also have been influenced by her mother's willing and repeated submission to her father's dreams that created hardship and loss for the children.   After years of praise from her father and mother concerning her academic achievement, a major disappointment in Helen's life was that her parents refused to support her attendance at college. It was this disappointment that led her to seek a job in a foreign country and resulted in her being hired to be a social correspondent for Salt Lake papers in Shanghai just before World War II.  Her presence in China at this critical time in world history gave Helen many opportunities to utilize the unique set of skills that she had learned from her mother.
Helen's mother was strong spirited. So was Helen. Neither woman would be deterred by a challenge. When Hannah Davis was a young teacher at Ricks College she could not find lodging. Her response was to use her savings to purchase land, arrange financing, and help build her own four room two-story home which was finished by Thanksgiving. She rented out rooms to other teachers and students for enough to make her payments and completely payoff the home by the spring.  This feat was all accomplished during her first year of teaching.
 Throughout her life, Hannah Davis met challenges by organizing and energizing community cooperative enterprises. This was true to her pioneer heritage and LDS (Mormon) Church membership. Helen grew up in this atmosphere, seeing her mother successfully bring together people on projects as varied as commercial chicken raising to children's supervised playgrounds.   Her mother was a well-respected community leader and activist at a time when most women were relegated to domestic chores and had little voice in community policies.  And though the culture of the early 1900's created an atmosphere where Hannah Davis many times subordinated her talents to the interests and whims of her husband, she was nevertheless able to make a mark with her community activities on behalf of women and children, her business acumen, and her raising of an intelligent, spirited daughter who would go far beyond the bounds of family and country to make contributions on an international scale.
Cooperatives and Communal Efforts
Helen's background and experience, with the firm imprint of Mormon pioneer and Puritan heritage, prepared her to act when she saw first-hand the starvation and serious needs of wartime China. Helen would have been well aware of her grandparents' stories about Utah's early Mormon communal sharing experiences in the United Order where goods were produced and held in common and where agricultural cooperatives would pool farmers' resources to grow and market crops to distant cities.  Helen initiated and organized a cooperative movement with the Chinese peasants that was so successful in sustaining China's resistance to Japanese invasion that the adjective describing the movement, "gung-ho" or "work together," later became the battle-cry of the U.S. Marines under Helen's good friend, Commander Evans F. Carlson.  This expression has become so common in today's American speech and thinking that it is used by almost everyone of all ages.  Only a few scholars know that this common American expression is actually a Chinese phrase that was associated with the efforts of a few Americans working with the Chinese on pioneer-style cooperatives similar to those used by the Mormons to survive in the 1800's hostile and severe wilderness of mountainous Utah.
Emphasis on Lifelong Learning
Helen was similar to her mother in a number of other ways. Helen was interested in lifelong learning and the idea of personal progression. Throughout their lives, both women strove to develop new skills and to expand their capabilities. They believed in living up to their potential by using all of their innate talents to the maximum and developing any skill that would help them achieve their goals. Her mother was an excellent typist, bookkeeper, and stenographer and used these skills throughout her life to teach others and to maintain her own independence and livelihood. Helen felt that her typewriter was her best friend and that writing had given her freedom, her wings to soar. She admonished her nieces to learn to type and chastised them for not learning this skill in high school.
The Importance of Beauty
Like her mother, Helen was beautiful and intelligent. Her mother had been voted the prettiest girl in town at a Fourth of July fair. Helen was often complimented on her looks and her stylish clothes. Her mother was frugal and Helen exhibited some of the same traits, not becoming a "clothes horse" even though she had the physical beauty to be a social ornament. Helen's first assignment as a reporter was to send to the United States appealing photographs and stories about the "golden glamorous Orient" in order to develop tourism during the bleak days of the depression. What Helen encountered in China was not glamorous and required her to use all of the skills and attitudes she had learned as a girl at her mother's side. Her mother taught her many diverse skills, from how to catch fish to how to take professional-looking photographs.  It was her mother's camera that Helen used in China that enabled her to capture on film the historic events unfolding around her. Both Helen and her mother were bridges between a traditional past and a fresh but uncertain future.
Ahead of Their Times
Both Helen and her mother Hannah were women ahead of their times. Both provided examples to their communities and to their extended families. Hannah Davis Foster gave her daughter the solid roots of attitudes and habits that allowed Helen Foster Snow to fly on wings of competency and self esteem. In an ultimate tribute, Helen's thoughts turned to her mother on her deathbed. According to her long time nurse and friend, Helen uttered her mother's name on her dying lips. In her long and productive life, Helen Foster Snow made a lasting contribution to the relationship between two great countries, China and the United States. This desire to bridge the two cultures and forge friendships was Helen's great contribution which is still in action today.  Perhaps this continuing legacy of cooperation between these powerful peoples is the greatest tribute a daughter can give to a mother's influence.

For additional information see Bridging: A photo essay on the life of Helen Foster Snow, compiled by Helen's niece, Sheril Foster Bischoff, translated by Mary Niu and An Wei, published by Shumway Family History Services, Yorba Linda, CA in 1997. 

The following photographs appeared in my essay in Bridging and are from the Foster Family archives provided by the gracious permission of Sheril Foster Bischoff.