The iconic American poet, Maya Angelou was famously married three times throughout her lifetime. Analyzing Angelou’s marriage history can provide insight into the poet’s determination and resilience in her personal life. Born on April 4th, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou first wed in 1941 at the age of 13. That marriage ended in a divorce 7 years later.
In the early 1950s, Angelou married for the second time to a Greek sailor named Paraskevopoulos. Angelou gave birth to her only son, Guy during this union. However, the couple separated due to Angelou’s husband’s infidelity. Angelou’s third and last marriage was in 1973 to a South African civil rights lawyer, Paul Gaston. Angelou had dated Gaston for over a decade prior to their marriage. This marriage was unlike Angelou’s first two marriages, and she called her partnership “companionable” rather than romantic. Angelou wasn’t necessarily invested in the idea of a romantic love story – she previously confessed that romantic love left her feeling restlessness and distress. The couple amicably split in 1981 ending Maya Angelou’s third and final marriage.
Before and after her marriages, Angelou’s life was marked with success. In her early twenties, she became a professional dancer, singer, and actor and extensive performer with Porgy and Bess and other African American theatrical companies. Additionally, she served as a freelance writer in Egypt and spent the latter part of her career an acclaimed author and poet. Throughout her life, Angelou never compromised her own standards, what made her happy, and she didn’t allow failure to define her. Despite the number of her marriages, Angelou lived her life to the fullest and found a sense of contentment in mastering and owning her own identity.
Family Before Marriage
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey Johnson and Vivian Baxter Johnson. In 1929, Bailey Johnson left his wife and their two children and moved away to California. Vivian Baxter couldn’t provide enough money to raise her children, so the Johnson family was temporarily separated. During this time, Bailey Jr. and the children resided much of their time with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. The household was quite impoverished but was predominately matriarchal and surrounded with love and warmth.
The Johnson family reunited when Vivian’s brother, Uncle Willie, who lived in Stamps, Arkansas, invited them to come and visit him. The family ended up staying with Uncle Willie and, as a result, Bailey Jr. and Maya dropped out of school. They continued to all live with Uncle Willie until 1941 when, at the age of 13, Maya married her first husband and moved with him to Oak Grove, Louisiana. After the divorce in 1951, Maya moved back to San Francisco and began her pursuit of dance success.
Angelou’s life and creative pursuits were deeply impacted by her family’s legacy and the environment where she actively and consciously engaged in the African American community. At first, she was very protective and cautious about her family’s past, but she eventually embraced her family’s history and chose to share it with her son Guy, who was born from her second marriage.
Societal Pressure on Marriage
During Angelou’s lifetime, it was a very common and socially accepted practice for single women to marry at a young age. This custom was mainly a result of the economic hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. Immediately after war, most couples married quickly to ensure that their financial difficulties would be compensated. This contributed to the trend of marrying at an earlier age and with family or cultural pressures to marry. Consequently, Maya Angelou married her first husband at the age of 13.
During this period, couples were expected to adhere to traditional gender roles and expected to prioritize their partner’s needs before their own. This put women in a particularly disadvantageous situation as their own ambitions and dreams were often put on standstill or compromised. Divorce was not an option many women considered and, instead, they faced intolerable situations or endured the hardships they faced. Unlike many women of her time, Maya Angelou decided to end her first marriage, despite the social conventions, determine her own notion of a happy life.
Angelou’s escape from the dangers of a young marriage allowed her to further explore her ambition to become a writer and to begin her travels around the world. Her resilience and daring attitude regarding her choice to take control of her own destiny defines her as an empowerment figure for subsequent generations of women.
Impact of her Marriages
Despite ending each of her marriages legally, Angelou’s resentment to romantic entrapment and commitment did not stop her from believing in the power of a strong relationship and companionship. While researching her good friend and lover Vus Make, she began to understand and appreciate the subtleties of loving relationships. Through Vus Mak, Angelou also learned and internalized the values of compassion, loyalty, and trust. It was through Vus Make’s example that Angelou could recognize the potential of a partnership that is based on respect and friendship, instead of the traditional stereotypical gender roles imposed on the expectations of partners.
Her marriage with Gaston furthered her understanding of the strengths of a companionable relationship instead of a romantic one. Despite working together in excellent terms and professional partnerships, Angelou and Gaston each defined their own independent lives. This allowed for Angelou to continue her practice and pursuit of her own ambitions and it allowed for a sense of equality within the partnership.
Apart from the brief companionship with Vus Mak and the marriage with Gaston, Angelou also surrounded herself with a close-knit, mostly female communities of many friends and lovers. Aside from her chosen family figure C. D. Godfrey, Angelou’s network of female confidantes also included other iconic women such as Rosa Guy, Elaine Brown, Louise M. Thompson Patterson and others. Through these relationships, Angelou demonstrated the power of a collective sisterhood which was not bound by the traditional conventions of marriage or partnership.
Perpetual Independence
Unlike many women during the early and mid-twentieth century, Angelou refused to accept the societal standards of marriage and pushed for independence in her life and creative practice. Her continual search for self-realization and an assurance of her name as a written and performance artist drove her to pursue her ambitions and to reject cultural traditions.
Angelou also found various methods to reject marital and societal conventions in her own work. Both her writing and her performances regularly contained matriarchal references and images of strong female leadership, suggesting the importance of avoiding entanglement as a woman. After all, Angelou was aware of the importance of independence and autonomy and wanted to protect her family and her intellectual legacy with her own hands.
Additionally, Angelou’s numerous journeys to distant areas around the world and her living in impoverished communities made Angelou part of the communities she visited for the sake of her work and her activism. Her moveability and readiness to embrace different cultures proved her sense of independence from all sorts of conventions, including those pertaining to marriage.
Love of Self
Although Angelou never settled with a husband, her many friends, partners and lovers suggested that a formal marriage didn’t have to be the only source of love and support for a woman. Angelou’s unconventional and restlessly active lifestyle was aimed to demonstrate the freedom of a single woman who relied on her own skills, abilities, and trusts without the help or support of a partner. By the time of her death in 2014, Angelou has accomplished many successes that most women of her time never even dreamed of reaching.
Angelou’s writings and her political and creative activism provided her with enough support and love, without relying on a husband or a partner. Marriage, in her own words, would only give her “the feeling of being caught” which she intended to avoid in all aspects of her life. Maya Angelou’s life and work should remind us of the possibility of coming out of the many abusive and controlling boundaries, in order to find our own peace and independence.
Focus on Improving
In the biographical essay written about Angelou shortly after her death, scholars and professionals hymned Angelou’s life for its successful professional accomplishments, for its independence, and for her compassion for the various people she encountered throughout her life. Countless times during her numerous interviews, Angelou mentioned her own opinion that she was never talented enough, which reflected her focus on a continued improvement of herself and her work.
In order to achieve her goals and ambitions, Angelou forged her own path and was determined to intentionally set boundaries that would enable her to confidently and safely express her art. Over the course of her life, Maya Angelou proved that the wonder of the world lies in the pursuit of self-fulfillment, and that marriage and many other external sources of love and affection aren’t necessarily required for it.
Unending Ambition
Despite her official marriages, Angelou lived her life independently and with a strong sense of her own autonomy. This unwavering determination and ambition led her to many successes including becoming a published author and poet. During her lifetime, she was dubbed the “Black Woman’s Poet Laureate” and was one of the most renowned and celebrated female writers around the world.
Angelou produced numerous plays, poetry, musicals, and books as well as, in her later years, contributing to lectures, interviews, and performance pieces. Even on her deathbed, she was still immersed in literature and was receiving new manuscripts to read and review. When Angelou completed “Mom & Me & Mom” in 2013, she became a self-accomplished poet, having written an autobiography in verse of her own life.
Maya Angelou’s refusal to accept marriage as a source of love and happiness didn’t dampen her capacity for compassion and commitment to other people – it only gave her the necessary space and freedom to become a multifaceted artist, author, and poet who wrote about themes of freedom and resistance.
