The Book of Gutsy Women Read online

  Rigoberta Menchú Tum

  Chelsea

  In fifth grade, my class read I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Published in 1983, it’s the first memoir I remember reading that had been written in my lifetime. Rigoberta writes of her experience as a young Quiché Indian in Guatemala who was exploited as a child in the fields and exposed to pesticides and horrific violence. We were lucky that we had teachers at Booker Arts Elementary in Little Rock who believed it was important that students knew about the daily injustice and horror faced in modern-day Guatemala by children, including Rigoberta.

  Rigoberta’s family couldn’t afford food or other basic necessities. She watched her youngest brother die of malnutrition while the family was working for poverty wages on a coffee plantation. Motivated by her anger at his death, Rigoberta moved to Guatemala City and took a job as a maid in order to learn Spanish (and, later, other Mayan languages in addition to her native Quiché) and to understand more about her country and the world. Rigoberta believed that to be as powerful as she hoped to be for her community, she needed first to leave.

  When she returned home, she learned that her father was in prison, accused of being part of a guerrilla force. She worked to free him and to help organize workers to fight for local indigenous rights, including protections and ownership of the land on which they toiled every day. After securing land ownership rights for her own community, Rigoberta advocated for indigenous rights across Guatemala. She also stood up against the gross human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan government and armed forces throughout the country’s decades-long civil war. Even after one of her brothers was tortured and killed by the Guatemalan military and her father was killed during a protest, Rigoberta refused to give up her fight for human rights and meaningful reforms for indigenous people.

  “Only together can we move forward, so that there is light and hope for all women on the planet.”

  —RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ TUM

  Forced into exile in 1981, Rigoberta went first to Mexico, then to France, where she met Venezuelan-French anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Elisabeth convinced Rigoberta to tell the story of her life; the tape-recorded interviews between the two of them became the basis for I, Rigoberta Menchú.

  When her memoir was published two years later, Rigoberta wasn’t yet twenty-five. While she had withstood immense personal loss—she would lose another brother to the regime’s violence while in exile—and had already accomplished an extraordinary amount for someone so young, she knew her work wasn’t finished. From exile, she continued to organize for indigenous rights and against the oppressive Guatemalan government. After the civil war ended in 1996, she worked to have the political and military leaders responsible for genocide against the indigenous community brought to justice; more than two hundred thousand people died over the course of the war, including many indigenous Guatemalans.

  When Rigoberta’s efforts were stymied in Guatemala, she looked to Spain, where the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation filed a criminal complaint against former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt and others. Finally, in 2005, a Spanish court ruled that genocide committed abroad could be prosecuted in Spain and called for the extradition of key members of the Guatemalan government during the civil war, including Ríos Montt. That gave momentum to efforts in Guatemala. In 2012, a Guatemalan court indicted and later convicted Ríos Montt of genocide, among other crimes. While that ruling was overturned, Rigoberta and her foundation continue to work to bring Ríos Montt and others to justice.

  In 1992, while the civil war was still ongoing, Rigoberta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As she was thrust onto the world stage, questions were raised about the authenticity of her autobiography. The New York Times reported that “based on nearly a decade of interviews with more than 120 people and archival research, the anthropologist, David Stoll, concludes that Ms. Menchú’s book ‘cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be’ because the Nobel laureate repeatedly describes ‘experiences she never had herself.’ ” Scholars like Stoll suggested that the younger brother who had died of starvation never existed; that, contrary to her claim on the first page of the book that she “never went to school,” she actually received a scholarship to earn the equivalent of a middle school education at a prestigious private boarding school.

  The Nobel Committee dismissed the questions and said there was “no question of revoking the prize.” Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said “All autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent.” He explained that the decision to award the prize to Rigoberta was based not only on her autobiography but on her advocacy for Guatemala’s indigenous people. Experts in the genre argued that her book was an example of testimonio, a method of blending personal and community history. Testimonio emerged out of common experiences between Latin America and solidarity movements in the United States. Its purpose was to help—even force—northern audiences, through storytelling, to understand a struggle they had not experienced firsthand.

  At ten or eleven years old, I didn’t know any of that; all I knew was what I read. Rigoberta’s book sparked an interest in Central America that never left me. Years later, in tenth grade, after we’d moved to Washington, D.C., I wrote my major research paper that year on the United Fruit Company’s conspiracy with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government under the guise of fighting the Cold War but really to protect United Fruit’s banana monopoly. While the events in Guatemala in 1954 are not the origin of the phrase “banana republic” (coined decades earlier by the great short story writer O. Henry), they certainly could have been. The United States’s actions in Guatemala were a particularly shameful chapter in American history (though in line with shameful behavior elsewhere at the time, from Iran to the Congo). I was proud of my dad when he apologized in 1999 on behalf of the United States for our country’s role in the brutal Guatemalan civil war that took hundreds of thousands of lives from the mid-1960s onward, a war that might not have happened had democracy not been denied by U.S.-backed forces in 1954. I still cringe every time I am in Dulles International Airport—named after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose brother, Allen Dulles, helmed the CIA in the mid-1950s.

  Even with the criticism she faced, Rigoberta didn’t retreat; she stayed in public life, returning to Guatemala to support Mayan communities and survivors of genocide and bring the perpetrators to justice. She went on to create WINAQ, the first indigenous-led political party. She ran for president of Guatemala twice, in 2007 and 2011. To this day, she continues to advocate for justice for the Mayan people in Guatemala and indigenous people everywhere.

  Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner

  JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE

  FLORENCE GRIFFITH JOYNER

  Chelsea

  When Jackie Joyner-Kersee was born in 1962, her parents named her after Jacqueline Kennedy. After all, as her grandmother announced: “Someday this little girl will be the first lady of something.” (Prescient words for the future first lady of track!) Her home in East Saint Louis, Illinois, was very different from the Kennedy White House in Washington, D.C. Jackie and her brother, Al, grew up across the street from a liquor store and a pool hall. At eleven years old, Jackie saw a man shot outside her house. Her parents wanted a different, brighter future for their children. Jackie focused on school, where she graduated in the top 10 percent of her class. And she didn’t excel only in the classroom.

  “I don’t think being an athlete is unfeminine. I think of it as a kind of grace.”

  —JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE

  As a teenager, Jackie won the National Junior Championships in the pentathlon, a competition in five different track events. She would go on to win the title three more times. She set the Illinois high school girls’ long jump record. In addition to track, she competed in volleyball and basketball. After graduation, she earned a scholarship to the University of Californi
a, Los Angeles. There, she competed in the long jump and on the basketball team. Even when she was a young woman, it was clear that Jackie’s talent was bigger than any one event or even one sport.

  In 1984, she made the Olympics, where, despite a pulled hamstring, she won a silver medal in the heptathlon, her signature event. The heptathlon consists of seven events over two days: 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200-meter dash, long jump, javelin, and 800-meter run. She would later become the first athlete to score over seven thousand points in the event. Jackie is the first person I remember watching throw a javelin or a shot put. It wasn’t a man who defined these acts of precision and strength for me—it was Jackie.

  Jackie’s coach, Bob Kersee, believed in her, on the track and off. And in 1986, she married him. He told her, only half joking, that he wouldn’t let her take his name until she set a world record. That year, at the Goodwill Games in Moscow, she did. At the 1988 Olympics, she set her fourth world record and won the gold medal in the heptathlon. At that same Olympics, Jackie’s sister-in-law, Florence “FloJo” Griffith Joyner, broke the 100- and 200-meter world records. She still holds those records more than thirty years later; the men’s record in the 100-meter, in the same period, has been broken twelve times. I cheered so hard for FloJo and Jackie from home in Little Rock that I went hoarse. Jackie’s Olympic career didn’t stop in 1988; four years later, in 1992, she became the first athlete to win the heptathlon in back-to-back Olympics.

  Jackie and FloJo were both targets of those who felt the need to demean the talent, skill, and strength of women athletes—particularly black women athletes—by suggesting they had resorted to steroids. Neither ever failed a drug test. FloJo passed eleven in 1988 alone. “I do not take steroids,” Jackie said. In fact, having grown up around substance use disorders and addiction, she made it clear that she stayed away from drugs and alcohol altogether. In her journal the year she was publicly accused, she wrote that there was nothing she could do to change other people’s opinions of her. “I questioned whether maybe it was the work of the devil, trying to distract me from what I can do, testing my faith. But deep down, I knew I didn’t do anything wrong.” In the meantime, she kept doing what she did best: working hard and competing. She refused to let others’ doubts discourage her.

  Before she became an Olympian, FloJo was asked by a teacher what she wanted to be when she grew up. She answered: “Everything.” FloJo brought her everything to all she did, on and off the track. When she had to leave college to help support her family, she worked as a bank clerk and part-time hair stylist, training at night when she could. She qualified for two Olympics, winning her first medal, a silver, at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. She won three golds at the 1988 Seoul Games, running with her gorgeous six-inch-long nails painted red, white, blue, and gold. After she stopped racing, FloJo continued to support young athletes and became a fashion designer. Both were continuations of her life and work, since she’d started making her own track uniforms in high school. She died tragically young, at the age of thirty-eight, of an epileptic seizure. Her legacy is one of speed, style, and determination. And she remains, deservedly, to this day, the Fastest Woman in the World.

  After Jackie retired from Olympic track, she played professional basketball, devoted even more time to the foundation she had started for at-risk youth, and encouraged other athletes to dedicate their time and talents, when not competing, to helping others. She understood that while talent is universal, opportunity is not, and she has spent her life trying to level the playing field so more young people can be “everything.”

  Education Pioneers

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  Chelsea

  When Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, later known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was born in mid-seventeenth-century Mexico, at the time still part of Spain, educated girls were a rarity, even privileged ones like her. Still, as a girl, Juana was hungry for knowledge. She would hide in the chapel of her family’s estate to read as often as she could, borrowing books from her grandfather’s library next door; she would later claim to have read all the books he had.

  While not much is known about Juana’s early life, we do know that she wrote a poem at eight and, around the same time, was sent to live in Mexico City with extended family. She left behind her mother, who continued living more than thirty miles away. We also know that Juana always dreamed of going to college. As university degrees would not be awarded to women in Mexico for more than two hundred years, Juana begged her family to let her enroll dressed as a man. They refused.

  “Yo no studio para saber más, sino para ignorer menos.”

  “I don’t study to know more, but to ignore less.”

  —SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  When she was thirteen, Juana entered into service as a lady-in-waiting to the wife of the viceroy of New Spain. Juana’s intelligence was unmistakable, and a year after she had joined the viceroy’s court, a series of scholars tested her on questions of literature, history, math, and more. Juana so impressed them that she and her intellect became well known throughout Mexico.

  Wanting to further her studies, and not wanting to get married, Juana took the only path available to her: She became a nun and joined the Convent of the Order of Saint Jerome. She seemed to struggle with the idea of blind faith, writing, “Can I not be saved while learning? Why would salvation need to come through the path of ignorance if that is repugnant to my nature?” In the end, she decided religious education was “the least disproportionate and most honorable decision I could make.” In the convent, Sor Juana had a study and library of her own, and time to read, write poetry and plays, and talk with other scholars (all men) at the nearby university. She wrote essays, plays, and passionate love poems to María Luisa, the wife of the new viceroy. “Loving you is a crime,” she wrote, “for which I never shall atone.”

  Like so many other outspoken women throughout history, she attracted her share of detractors. In 1690, more than twenty years after she entered the convent, Sor Juana wrote a letter criticizing a recent Jesuit sermon. The letter was published without her permission by a high-ranking bishop, and Sor Juana was criticized both for the letter’s contents and for focusing on nonreligious themes in her poetry. She responded to the furor with her now-famous “Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz” (“Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross”), which is recognized today as the first articulation of a woman’s right to education in the Americas.

  Although she endured intense backlash for “Respuesta” and various priests demanded that she renounce her work and studies, Sor Juana continued writing. In her poem Hombres Necios (Foolish Men), Sor Juana responded, line by line, to the impossible double standards to which men hold women. (“You think highly of no woman,” she wrote, “no matter how modest: if she / rejects you she is ungrateful, / and if she accepts, unchaste.”) And in her poem “Primero Sueño” (“First Dream”), she described the soul’s quest for knowledge, making clear that it’s not only men whose souls thirst to understand more. As a nun, she also scandalized audiences with her lyric poems celebrating physical beauty: “I shall not play the slenderness / Of your fine, exquisite torso / For the bend of your waist is as / Troubling as a trill in the song.”

  Throughout her life, Sor Juana defied expectations. In her forties, she sold the four thousand books she owned, as well as her musical instruments, and donated the proceeds to charity. In 1695, while taking care of fellow nuns who were sick with the plague, Sor Juana fell ill and died.

  In “Respuesta,” she wrote that “God has given me the gift of a very profound love of truth.” That love of truth and knowledge was a dangerous trait for a woman in the 1600s. Sor Juana was hundreds of years ahead of her time, something she may well have known then. Her extraordinary life has been the subject of multiple books, plays, and films, and people in Mexico see her face every day on the two-hundred-peso note, a constant reminder of a woman who believed her intelligence was something to be cultivated
, valued, and admired—never downplayed or apologized for.

  Margaret Bancroft

  Chelsea

  In mid-nineteenth-century America, there were few opportunities for young people with disabilities to go to school. Prejudice abounded, and the public and private schools that did exist were generally focused on more privileged white deaf and blind children.

  One person who recognized these inequities was Margaret Bancroft. Born in 1854, Margaret always loved school. After she graduated from the Philadelphia Normal School, she became a fifth grade public school teacher. She was beloved by her students and took a particular interest in children who had trouble studying. Rather than write them off, she figured out why they were struggling; some had vision impairments, deafness, or cognitive challenges. She often consulted with doctors to identify the best way to tailor her teaching to the individual needs of her students. The way she saw it, it was a teacher’s responsibility to find the best ways to educate children with disabilities—not a child’s or a family’s. When one of those same doctors suggested she start a school of her own, she boldly announced that she planned to resign in order to do so. Members of her school board tried to convince her to stay; one man told her that it was selfish for such a talented teacher to waste her potential on students who were less worthwhile. Margaret reportedly replied that every child deserved to learn.

  Margaret fiercely believed in the potential of all students to learn, as long as they had the right environment, with dedicated attention, patience, and compassion. In 1883, she founded the Haddonfield Training School, which took an innovative approach, emphasizing nutrition, exercise, and sensory and artistic instruction—elements that were far from standard at schools for the deaf and blind, or even more “conventional” schools.