The choices she made were shaped by conditions: the specific growth trajectory of Los Angeles, the specific network of relationships she had built through the Owens family and her professional work, the specific legal and social environment of post-emancipation California. But within those conditions, she made choices that were not inevitable. She could have lived more privately, spent more of her wealth on herself and her immediate family, been less involved in the community institutions that consumed her resources and energy. She chose otherwise.
The teaching her great-granddaughter transmitted — keep your hand open — was a description of that choice, stated simply enough to be passed down through generations in a form that could be remembered and taught. It is a good description. What she built, over thirty-five years, was built with an open hand: open to give, open to receive, open to the community that she served and that sustained her.
The city she helped build still carries traces of what she did: the church she helped found, the park at 333 South Spring Street, the wall de Bretteville built, the proposed square that may eventually bear her name. These are the durable marks of a life that was otherwise largely undocumented, the residue of a practice of community that sustained itself without seeking monuments and found them anyway, long after the woman who generated them was gone.
## The Children She Helped Bring Into the World
A dimension of Biddy Mason’s legacy that is impossible to quantify but worth acknowledging is the scale of her midwifery practice over three decades in a growing city. She was present at the births of hundreds of children in Los Angeles across the years from 1856 to her death in 1891. The specific number is not documented, but the accounts of her practice describe a continuous and wide-ranging body of work that touched families across the city’s social and ethnic spectrum.