A world traveler, anthropologist and champion of women, Ruth Elizabeth Sutherlin Finney Hayward never really retired. Instead she traded in a decades-long career with the United Nations to devote herself to the cause of Tibetan Buddhism.
Hayward, '61, died at her home in Pasadena, Calif., on June 11 after a 17-month battle with brain cancer. She was 73.
Born in Indiana, Hayward was raised in San Mateo and obtained a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Stanford and a PhD in cultural anthropology from Harvard. She served on the faculty of the University of Hawaii before joining the United Nations in 1980, starting at the Food and Agriculture Organization and then working for UNICEF in Mexico and South Asia. Her last years with the U.N. were spent as senior adviser for planning and monitoring programs to prevent violence against women, an experience that led to her 2000 book, Breaking the Earthenware Jar: Lessons from South Asia to End Violence against Women and Girls.
After leaving UNICEF in 2001, Hayward and her second husband, Robert Hayward, '61—a high school and college classmate she reconnected with at a Stanford reunion—traveled widely. During a trip to Kathmandu, they became fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism and brought back several pieces of furniture designed for Buddhist monasteries. These objects formed the core of the premier exhibition of its kind in the United States at the Pan Asian Museum in Pasadena and then the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
As Hayward grew more devoted to the cause of the Tibetan people, she and her husband worked to set up a school in India, where many exiled Tibetans fled. She founded and directed the Panchen Lama-Tashi Lhunpo Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Tibetan lineage and culture in exile by rebuilding the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in India. The project, supported by the Dalai Lama, is building a prayer hall that will be essential to educating a new generation of Tibetan monks. Hayward produced a film about the monastery, Oh, Bless Us, Gedun Drup: A Prayer Hall for the Dalai Lama, which was sponsored by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.
Hayward's son Sean Finney recalls living in Hawaii as a child and moving to Rome while his mother was with the U.N. "My mother had an intensely creative and open-minded approach to life. When I came home for Thanksgiving a few years ago, I wasn't at all surprised to find a Buddhist monk at the table, chanting before the Tofurkey."
Hayward is survived by her husband, Robert; former husband, Ben Finney; sons, Gregory and Sean Finney; stepdaughters, Erica Hayward and Wendy Garland; one granddaughter; two step-grandchildren; a brother.
Julie Muller Mitchell, '79, is a writer in San Francisco.
