My paternal grandmother, who died long before I was born (in 1925, when my father was only 8) had been an organizer for the Ladies' Land League in County Mayo, Ireland. I'm not sure exactly what she did for this non-violent political movement, but her obituary was prominently featured in a couple of Irish-American newspapers, presumably because of her political activities as a teenager, before she married my grandfather (who also died before I ever knew him) and the two of them emigrated to America.

My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, lived well into her nineties, and I knew and loved her her very well. She was an immigrant, too, from a German-speaking family living in the French province of Alsace. When her husband, a self-employed printer, died at age 61, leaving no retirement fund and little in the way of savings, Grandma -- who had never even ventured down the stairs to the basement print shop -- took over the family business, learning to set metal type by hand, humping heavy assemblies of lead onto the two Chandler-Price letterpresses, ordering paper, making sales and deliveries, etc. -- and she kept it up for years, finally "retiring" -- gradually -- sometime after age eighty. Of course, she had many other wonderful qualities, but her identity as a late-blooming independent businesswoman is quite a story.