Liberian Women Divided Over Nobel Prize

From the Liberian Daily Observer:

Leaders of three of Liberia’s foremost women’s peace advocacy groups – the Liberia Women’s Initiative (LWI), the Mano River Women Peace Network (MARWOPNET) and the Women In Peace-building Network (WIPNET) – are at loggerheads apparently over who might have been more deserving of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, won in part by two daughters of Liberia.

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, was awarded to two Liberian women, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, and a Yemeni co-winner, for “their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

The two Liberian peace and human rights campaigners shared the Prize with Yemeni activist Tawwakol Karman.

But eminent personalities of the women’s movement in Liberia, including Mother Mary Brownell and Madam Theresa Leigh-Sherman, have described the awarding of the Prize to Leymah Gbowee as a misplaced decision by the Nobel Committee because, according to them, Gbowee “should have been there when the bullets were flying.”

Mirren Questions Number Of Female Nobel Prize Winners

From the Washington Post:

ritish actress Helen Mirren hailed this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to three women as historic, but said Sunday it’s shameful that so few women have won the award since it was created in 1901.

Mirren said the award marks an “extraordinary moment in the history of women,” but that it is “slightly shameful statistically that only 12 women have won it in a 112 years, when you think how important women historically have always been, specifically in terms of peace.”

She spoke to The Associated Press before the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo on Sunday, which she will host with American actress Rosario Dawson.

The concert will honor this year’s peace prize winners Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and women’s right activist Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia, and democracy activist Tawakkul Karman of Yemen. Together, the three have boosted the number of women who have received the peace prize from 12 to 15.

See my post: Nobel Prize Winning Women

Nobel Prize Winning Women

From The Nation:

History was made yesterday when Liberian and Africa’s first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, led two other women to win the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

The others are: a Liberian peace activist, Leyma Gbowee and a woman who stood up to Yemen’s authoritarian regime, Tawakkul Karman. Tawakkul is the first Arab woman to win the prize.

The trio won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to secure women’s rights, which the prize committee described as fundamental to advancing world peace.

The 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award was therefore split among them.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the three women “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” the prize committee said.

Johnson Sirleaf, the 72-year-old Harvard-trained economist, became Africa’s first democratically elected female president in 2005.

Gbowee, who organised a group of Christian and Muslim women to challenge Liberia’s warlords, was honoured for mobilising women “across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections.”

Karman is a 32-year-old mother of three who heads the human rights group, Women Journalists without Chains. She has been a leading figure in organising protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh that kicked off in late January as part of a wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that have convulsed the Arab world.

  

Read more at the Guardian:

Kenyan Nobel Laureate Dies

From Inside Africa:

Kenyan Wangari Maathai, the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize, died Monday after a battle with cancer. She was 71.

Maathai, an environmentalist, had long campaigned for human rights and the empowerment of Africa's most impoverished people.

More than 30 years ago she founded the Green Belt Movement, a tree-planting campaign to simultaneously mitigate deforestation and to give locals, especially women and girls, access to resources like firewood for cooking and clean water. They have since planted more than 40 million trees.

"Professor Maathai's departure is untimely and a very great loss to all who knew her -- as a mother, relative, co-worker, colleague, role model and heroine -- or who admired her determination to make the world a more peaceful, healthier and better place," her organization said.

Interview: Laureate in Exile

From National Review Online:

Ebadi was born in 1947, the daughter of an expert on commercial law (Mohammad Ali Ebadi). According to most accounts, she became the first female judge in the entire history of Iran. An amazing distinction, given the age of the country. But when the Khomeinists seized power, she had to quit being a judge. They said that Islam forbade women to serve as judges — for one thing, they were too emotional. So, Ebadi devoted herself to work as a human-rights lawyer.

She has been living in exile since 2009, when Iran experienced a great amount of turmoil. It is my understanding that she still has family in Iran. (I did not ask this in my time with her, which was a generous amount of time, but not unlimited.) One question has been, How free is Shirin Ebadi to speak her mind, given what the regime can do to her loved ones?

Over the years, she has spouted her fair share of anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric (or rhetoric that can be interpreted that way). Some Iranians have suspected that she does this in order to buy a little protection from the regime — to keep it from her own and others’ throats.

A Nobel Year For Women

From Associated Press:

A record five women were among the 13 people awarded Nobel Prizes on Thursday, including a writer who depicted life behind the Iron Curtain and two American researchers who showed how chromosomes protect themselves from degrading.

The prizes were created in Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, which stipulated that they be granted to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." They were first awarded in 1901.

Only 40 women have won the prestigious awards, including Marie Curie who was given the 1903 physics prize and the chemistry prize eight years later. In all, 802 individuals and 20 organizations have received Nobel Prizes over the years.

* Romanian-born author Herta Mueller accepted the Nobel literature award for her critical depiction of life behind the Iron Curtain — work drawn largely from her personal experiences.

* Elinor Ostrom, 76, made history by being the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing it with fellow American Oliver Williamson for their work in economic governance.

* Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn, 61, and Carol W. Greider, 48, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with countryman Jack W. Szostak for their work in solving the mystery of how chromosomes protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

* The chemistry award was shared by 70-year-old Ada Yonath of Israel and Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells. Their research is being used to develop new antibiotics.

Women and Nobel Prizes

From University World News:

Only 39 Nobel Prizes have been handed out to women, and that includes this year's three female winners and both of Marie Curie's awards, writes Amber Bellaire for The Globe and Mail. Considering that the Nobel Foundation was founded in 1900, Ada Yonath, Elizabeth H Blackburn and Carol W Greider were nothing short of ecstatic on the announcement of their awards this week.Israeli scientist Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Tuesday for mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells, at the atomic level. "These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," the academy said in its announcement. Yonath shared the prize with American colleagues Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz.Blackburn and Greider were co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in medicine, announced on Monday at the Nobel assembly in Stockholm, Sweden. The two women shared the award with another American, Jack W Szostak.

Nobel Winning Women

From Yahoo News:

Elizabeth Blackburn has become Australia's first female Nobel Laureate, after winning the Nobel Medicine Prize, along with Americans Carol Greider and Jack Szosta, for identifying a key molecular switch in cellular ageing.

The trio solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

The Nobel citation said the laureates found the solution in the ends of the chromosomes - structures called telomeres that are often compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoe laces that keep those laces from unravelling.

From About Women's History:

Herta Muller, a German-speaking Romanian novelist whose works are not well known outside Germany, was named the Nobel literature prize winner for 2009. Muller emigrated to West Germany in 1987 after being refused permission to leave in 1985. Her novels draw on her experience of the oppression and horrors of Ceausescu's Romania

From Xinhuanet:

Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath, the fourth woman who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, said on Wednesday that women can do as well as men in science.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science said in a statement on Wednesday that Yonath, together with Thomas A. Steitz from America's Yale University and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain's Cambridge, won the prize for their respective achievements on "the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life."

Yonath said after the announcement that she was very surprised about her winning the prize.