she wrote her speeches in such a way as to avoid the letters she had trouble with. Before she “retired” to campaign for women’s suffrage and child labor protection, she had established 101 free libraries and 1,480 traveling libraries in the state of Wisconsin.
GABRIELA MISTRAL voice of the people
A poor, rural schoolteacher of mixed race, Gabriela Mistral went on to become the first Latin American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in the Chilean village of Montegrande in 1889. Her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, was a teacher of Basque descent, and her father, Jeronimo Villanueva, also a teacher, was a poet of Indian and Jewish birth. Jeronimo was overly fond of wine and not quite so attached to his duties as a breadwinner and father; he deserted the family when Gabriela was three. As a schoolgirl, Gabriela discovered her call to poetry and tapped into her own stubborn independence, switching her birth name, Lucila, for her choice, Gabriela. As an adult, she also chose a fitting surname, Mistral, hinting at a fragrant Mediterranean wind.
Her first love was a hopelessly romantic railroad worker who killed himself when the relationship faltered after two years. Her first book of poetry, Sonetas de la Muerta (Sonnets of Death), was written as a result of her sadness, guilt, and pain over the death of this man. In 1914, she received Chile’s top prize for poetry.
In the ‘20s and ‘30s, she wrote many volumes of poetry, including Desolación (Desolation), Ternura (Tenderness), Questions, Tala, and a mixed-media anthology, Readings for Women. In addition to writing and teaching, Mistral felt a special sympathy for women and children and worked to help victims of World Wars I and II. She made social strides as an educator as well. She initiated programs for schooling the poor, founded a mobile library system, and traveled the world, gleaning whatever information she could to improve Chile’s education system. In 1923, she was named “Teacher of the Nation.” She became an international envoy and ambassador for her country off and on for twenty years, eventually serving in the League of Nations and the United Nations.
In the late 1920s, a military government seized power in Chile and offered Mistral an ambassadorship to all the nations of Central America. Mistral refused to work for the military state and made a scathing public denouncement of the government machine. Her pension was revoked, and Mistral had to support herself, her mother, and her sister through her writing. She lived in exile for a while in France, eventually moving to the United States, where she taught at the University of Puerto Rico and at Middlebury and Barnard Colleges.
In 1945 she received the Nobel Prize. Upon accepting the revered award, Gabriela Mistral, in her plain black velvet, made a sharp contrast with Sweden’s dashing King Gustav. Pointedly, she didn’t accept the prize for herself, but on behalf of “the poets of my race.” Mistral died in 1957 and was mourned by her native Chile, where she was revered as a national treasure. She was the “people’s poet,” giving voice to the humble people to whom she belonged—the Indians, mestizos, and campesinos—and scorning rampant elitism and attempts to create a racial hierarchy in Europe and in her beloved Chile.
I consider myself to be among the children of that twisted thing that is called a racial experience, or better, a racial violence.
Gabriela Mistral
LORRAINE HANSBERRY young, gifted, and Black
Chicago native Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930 to a politically aware and progressive family who knew that they had to work to make the changes they wished to see. But they paid a price. When Lorraine was only five, she was given a white fur coat for Christmas but was beaten up when she wore it to school. In 1938, the Black family moved to Hyde Park, an exclusive and exclusively white neighborhood. Lorraine’s first memories of living in that house are of violence—being spit on, cursed at, and having bricks thrown through the windows. Her mother Nannie kept a gun inside the house in case it got any worse. An Illinois court evicted them, but her real estate broker father hired NAACP attorneys and had the decision overturned at the Supreme Court level, winning a landmark victory in 1940. He died at a relatively young age, which Lorraine ascribed to the pressure of the long struggle for civil rights.
Lorraine Hansberry’s parents’ work as activists brought them into contact with the Black leaders of the day. She was well accustomed to seeing luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. DuBois in her home. Educated in the segregated public schools of the time, she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before she moved to New York for “an education of another kind.”
Throughout her life, she stayed dedicated to the values her parents had instilled in her and worked steadfastly for the betterment of Black people. At a picket line protesting the exclusion of Black athletes from college sports, Lorraine met the man she would marry, a white Jewish liberal, Robert Nemiroff. Lorraine worked for Paul Robeson’s radical Black newspaper Freedom until her husband’s career as a musician and songwriter earned enough to support them so that Lorraine could write full-time.
Her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, was a huge hit, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as Best Play of the Year in 1959. Hansberry was the youngest American and the first Black person to receive this prize. This proved to be a watershed event; after the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Black actors and writers entered the creative arts in a surge. Lorraine continued to write plays, but in 1963 was diagnosed with cancer. She died six years after winning the Drama Critics’ Award at the age of thirty-four, tragically cutting short her work. Nevertheless, she made huge strides with her play, forever changing “the Great White Way.”
Racism is a device that, of itself, explained nothing. It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.
From Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry
SELMA LAGERLÖF AND NELLY SACHS making history
In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman and the first Swedish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for her body of work, including the 1891 novel To the Story of Gösta Berling and the 1902 two-volume work of fiction Jerusalem, the chronicle of Swedish peasants who migrated to Jerusalem. Selma was the preeminent Swedish writer of her day and produced an impressive body of work: thirty novels and four biographical narratives. She wasn’t content merely to be the most brilliant novelist of her age, however; she also worked extremely hard at obtaining the release of Jewish writer Nelly Sachs from a Nazi concentration camp. Sachs, inspired by her savior, won the Nobel Prize in Literature herself in 1966!
BARBARA TUCHMAN trailblazer
One of the most respected historians of the twentieth century and the only woman to win a Pulitzer Prize twice, Barbara Tuchman has written first-rate chronicles accessible to readers from every walk of life. The core of her theory of history is that true understanding comes from observing the patterns that are created through an aggregation of details and events. Tuchman has covered topics from the Trojan War to the Middle Ages, the leaders of World War I, and the United States’ problematic involvement in Vietnam. All of her books are known for their narrative power and for her portrayals of the players on the world stage as believable individuals.
Born in 1912, Barbara Tuchman attended Radcliffe College and, after graduation, took her first job as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo. She began writing articles for several periodicals and went on to work as a staff editorial assistant at the Nation and a correspondent for London’s New Statesman. From 1934 to 1945, Tuchman worked for the Far East News Desk and Office of War Information. Here, she got firsthand experience of researching and writing about history as it happened.
Tuchman put this invaluable wartime experience to good
