IN honour of International Women’s Day, celebrated the world over on Saturday, March 8, the Women and Gender Equality Commission last Wednesday, at the Parliament Chambers, launched an exhibition to highlight the lives and accomplishments of remarkable women both local and international. The exhibition showcases 12 women, seven of whom are from Guyana’s shores.JUNE RAMSAMMY
A humble woman who blazed a trail for many women in Guyana, the late June Ramsammy quietly bore the banner of the “first” woman in Guyana to be appointed in a number of prominent positions in both her private and professional lives.

She was the first female Head of Human Resources in Banks DIH, one of Guyana’s major employers where she had responsibility for one thousand, five hundred (1,500) employees.
She was a founder-member of the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Guyana. She was the first female Personnel Manager at the Guyana Graphic newspaper in the late 1950s and the early 1960s and the first woman to sit on the Labour Board of Guyana.
One of the first women to be accepted into the Rotary Club of Guyana, June eventually earned the coveted Rotary recognition of service with the title of Paul Harris Fellow conferred on her; an honour awarded as a tribute to a Rotarian whose life demonstrates a shared purpose with the objectives of the Rotary Foundation and as appreciation for contributions to the Rotary’s humanitarian and educational programmes.
A devout Anglican, she was the first to represent her church on the Diocesan Synod and to serve on its Board of Trustees. June was also a member of the Church Committee of the Aloysius Anglican Chapel and was keenly involved with the Anglican diocese youth culture.
In her formative years, June Ramsammy started out in a teaching career and completed a course in Secretarial Studies before undergoing formal training in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations, graduating with a Diploma. She attended several Advanced Courses in Personnel Training in St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Kitts, Puerto Rico and Barbados.
She was a facilitator and participant at several local forums. At an international Breweries Convention, held in Guyana, she presented a paper titled, “Employees as an investment Asset”, and at a similar convention in Puerto Rico, gave a presentation titled: “Labour Relation in the Caribbean”.
Her life of service to both state and civil society was exemplified in the number of corporate and voluntary organisations in which she was actively involved. A sample of these included in the arbitration tribunals of the Guyana Electricity Corporation on two occasions under the chairmanship of Justice Prem Persaud and Justice Loris Ganpatsingh respectively. She was a committee member of the councils of the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security and the Consultative Association of Guyanese Industry (CAGI). She was also actively involved in the Mildred Mansfield Youth Club Board.
June Ramsammy deftly and convincingly broke the proverbial glass ceiling for women in the corporate sector here and stands as a role model for generations of business and professional women that followed in her wake.

ALICE MUNRO
Alice Ann Munro born on July 10, 1931 and is a Canadian author whose work, written in English has been described as having revolutionised the architecture of short stories, and she is regarded as “one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction”. Her work has been compared to Anton Chekov and in 2013 she was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as “master of the contemporary short story”. She had previously won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, and is also a three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction. She is the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Munro’s fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.

Early life
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario to a father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, who was a fox and mink farmer and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw née Chamney) a schoolteacher. Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario under a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James’s job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro’s Books, which still operates.
Career
Munro’s highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories. In 1978, Munro’s collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States). This book earned Munro a second Governor General’s Literary Award. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia for public appearances and readings. In 1980 Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. In 2006, Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was adapted for the screen and directed by Sarah Polley as Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.
Since the 1980s, Munro has published a short-story collection at least once every four years, most recently in 2001, 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2012. First versions of Munro’s stories have appeared in journals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Harper’s Magazine, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review. Her collections have been translated into 13 languages.

TAWAKKOL ABDEL-SALAM KARMAN 
Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman, is a Yemeni journalist, politician and senior member of the Al-Islah political party, and human rights activist. She leads the group “Women Journalists Without Chains,” which she co-founded in 2005. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that is part of the Arab Spring uprisings. She has been called the “Iron Woman” and “Mother of the Revolution” by Yemenis. She is a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize and the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate to date.
Karman gained prominence in her country after 2005 in her roles as a Yemeni journalist and an advocate for a mobile phone news service denied a license in 2007, after which she led protests for press freedom. She organised weekly protests after May 2007 expanding the issues for reform. She redirected the Yemeni protests to support the “Jasmine Revolution,” as she calls the Arab Spring, after the Tunisian people overthrew the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.
Tawakkol Karman was born on 7 February 1979 in Mekhlaf, Ta’izz province, Yemen. She is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and is the mother of three children.
Karman earned an undergraduate degree in commerce from the University of Science and Technology, Sana’a, a graduate degree in political science from the University of Sana’a. In 2012, she received an Honorary Doctorate in International Law from University of Alberta in Canada.
Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC) with seven other female journalists in 2005 in order to promote human rights, “particularly freedom of opinion and expression, and democratic rights.” Although it was founded as “Female Reporters without Borders,” the present name was adopted in order to get a government license.
Tawakkol Karman was affiliated with the Al-Thawrah newspaper at the time she founded WJWC in March 2005. She is also a member of the Yemeni Journalists’ Syndicate.

RIGOBERTA MENCHU 
Rigoberta Menchú is an indigenous Guatemalan woman, who has dedicated her life to publicising the plight of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She received the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and Prince of Asturias Award in 1998. She is the subject of the testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and the author of the autobiographical work, Crossing Borders.
Menchú is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She has also become a figure in indigenous political parties and ran for President of Guatemala in 2007 and 2011.
Rigoberta Menchú was born to a poor indigenous family of K’iche’ descent near Laj Chimel, a small town in the north-central Guatemalan province of El Quiché. After leaving school, she worked as an activist campaigning against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan armed forces during the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
In 1981, Rigoberta Menchú was exiled and escaped to Mexico. In 1982, she narrated a book about her life to Venezuelan author and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos, “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia” (My Name is Rigoberta Menchu and this is how my Conscience was Born), which was translated into five other languages including English and French. The book made her an international icon at the time of the on-going conflict in Guatemala.
Since the Guatemalan Civil War ended, Menchú has campaigned to have members of the Guatemalan political and military establishment tried in Spanish courts. On 23 December 2006, Spain called for the extradition from Guatemala of seven former members of Guatemala’s government on charges of genocide and torture. Spain’s highest court ruled that cases of genocide committed abroad could be judged in Spain, even if no Spanish citizens have been involved. In addition to the deaths of Spanish citizens, the most serious charges include genocide against the Mayan people of Guatemala.
Menchú has become involved in the Indian pharmaceutical industry as president of the company Salud para Todos (“Health for All”) and the company “Farmacias Similares”, with the goal of offering low-cost generic medicines. She served as presidential goodwill ambassador for the 1996 peace accords.
In 2006, Menchú was one of the founders of the Nobel Women’s Initiative along with sister Nobel Peace Laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Six women representing North America and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa decided to bring together their experiences in a united effort for peace with justice and equality. It is the goal of the Nobel Women’s Initiative to help strengthen work being done in support of women’s rights around the world.
She is a member of PeaceJam, an organisation whose mission is “to create young leaders committed to positive change in themselves, their communities and the world through the inspiration of Nobel Peace Laureates who pass on the spirit, skills, and wisdom they embody.”
Rigoberta Menchú is also a member of the Foundation Chirac’s honour committee, ever since the foundation was launched in 2008 by former French President Jacques Chirac in order to promote world peace.
In 2007, Menchú announced that she would form an indigenous political party called Encuentro por Guatemala and that she would stand in the 2007 presidential election. Had she been elected, she would have become Latin America’s fourth indigenous president after Mexico’s Benito Juárez, Peru’s Alejandro Toledo and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.
In 2009 she was involved in the newly founded party Winaq. Menchú was a candidate for the 2011 presidential election, but lost in the first round.

CHIMAMANDA ADICHE 
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 15 September 1977) is a writer from Nigeria. She has been called “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [that] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”.
Born in the city of Enugu, she grew up in the university town of Nsukka in south-eastern Nigeria, where the University of Nigeria is situated. While she was growing up, her father James Nwoye Adichie was a professor of statistics at the university, and her mother Grace Ifeoma was the university’s first female registrar. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.
Adichie studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the university’s Catholic medical students. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria and moved to the United States for college. After studying communications and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, she transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to live closer to her sister, who had a medical practice in Coventry. She received a bachelor’s degree from Eastern, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2001.
In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts in African studies from Yale University.
Adichie was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005–2006 academic year. In 2008 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also been awarded a 2011–2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Adichie published a collection of poems in 1997 (Decisions) and a play (For Love of Biafra) in 1998. She was shortlisted in 2002 for the Prize for her short story “You in America”.
In 2003, her story “That Harmattan Morning” was selected as joint winner of the BBC Short Story Awards, and she won the O. Henry prize for “The American Embassy”. She also won the David T. Wong International Short Story Prize 2002/2003 (PEN Center Award) and a 2007 Beyond Margins Award for her short story “Half of a Yellow Sun”.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), received wide critical acclaim; it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2005).
Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the flag of the short-lived nation of Biafra, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was awarded the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun has been adapted into a film starring Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and BAFTA award winner Thandie Newton and is set for release in 2014. Her third book, The Thing around Your Neck (2009), is a collection of short stories.
In 2010 she was listed among the authors of The New Yorkers “20 Under 40” Fiction Issue. Adichie’s story, “Ceiling”, was included in the 2011 edition of The Best American Short Stories.
In 2013 she published her third novel, Americanah which was selected by the New York Times as one of The 10 Best Books of 2013.
Adichie spoke on “The Danger of a Single Story” for TED in 2009. On 15 March 2012, she delivered the “Connecting Cultures” Commonwealth Lecture 2012 at the Guildhall, London. Adichie also spoke on being a feminist for TED. Huston in December 2012, with her speech entitled, “We should all be feminists” This speech was sampled for the 2013 song “***Flawless” by American performer Beyoncé, where it attracted further attention.
Adichie, who is married, divides her time between Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops, and the United States.

ARUNDHATI ROY 
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in human rights and environmental causes. Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.
Early life and background
Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta and Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women’s rights activist from Kerala. When she was two, her parents divorced and she returned with her mother and brother to Kerala. For a time, the family lived with Roy’s maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. When she was 5, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school.
Roy attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met architect Gerard da Cunha. The two lived together in Delhi, and then Goa, before they broke up.
Roy returned to Delhi, where she obtained a position with the National Institute of Urban Affairs. In 1984 she met independent filmmaker Pradip Krishen, who offered her a role as a goatherd in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. The two later married. They collaborated on a television series on India’s independence movement and on two films, Annie and Electric Moon. Disenchanted with the film world, Roy worked various jobs, including running aerobics classes. Roy and Krishen eventually split up. She became financially secure by the success of her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997.

Early career: screenplays
Roy attracted attention in 1994, when she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi. In her film review entitled, “The Great Indian Rape Trick”, she questioned the right to “restage the rape of a living woman without her permission,” and charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.
The God of Small Things
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam.
The publication of The God of Small Things catapulted Roy to international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. It reached fourth position on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance; it was published in May, and the book had been sold to eighteen countries by the end of June.
Later career
Since the success of her novel, Roy has written a television serial, The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).
Awards
Arundhati Roy was awarded the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. The award carried a prize of about US$30,000 and a citation that noted, “The book keeps all the promises that it makes.” Prior to this, she won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in which she captured the anguish among the students prevailing in professional institutions.
In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for her work “about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations,” in order “to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity.”
In 2003, she was awarded ‘special recognition’ as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco with Bianca Jagger, Barbara Lee and Kathy Kelly.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence.
In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India’s Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it “in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by ‘violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarization and economic neo-liberalization.’ In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing.
Written By Michelle Gonsalves