Mirabal Sisters Among TIME’s 100 Women of The Year
TIME has announced its 100 Women of the Year, 10 for every decade between the 1920s and the 2010s. To open up 1960, they chose las hermanas Mirabal, symbols of democracy in the Dominican Republic.
(Illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME; Ricardo Hernandez—AFP/Getty)
As a Dominican woman, I need to place the formalities of the classic third-person journalism aside to state how proud I am to see the Mirabal sisters among the TIME’s 100 Women of The Year. To witness icons that have such an established place in the history of your nation be rightfully placed in worldwide positions of honor is magnificent.
What a time we are living in.
For 72 years, TIME named a Man of the Year. Even after changing the title to “Person of the Year” in 1999, men were mostly still winning the award. This led to the creation of the “Women of the Year” project, which seeks to spotlight influential women who were often overshadowed, including those who occupied positions that were often handed to men, but mostly those who “found their influence through activism or culture”.
As Nancy Gibbs, former TIME editor-in-chief, states, “this project is an exercise in looking at the ways in which women held power due to systemic inequality.” And this is so like The Butterflies, who were incredibly brave in standing their ground despite the terror inflicted by the dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal, three of four sisters who were married with children, lived under the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator and risked their lives to work in the resistance. In the midst of 31 years of violence and fear, repressed civil liberties and dissent, the Mirabal sisters were part of the underground movement that challenged the regime. The state’s murder of the three sisters (aged 36, 34 and 25) on November 25, 1960, outraged the public and was a key trigger for Trujillo’s assassination by a group of dissidents and former allies six months later.
According to TIME, after the transition to democracy in the late 1970’s, the Butterflies, as Dominicans call the sisters, became symbols of both democratic and feminist resistance. A fourth Mirabal sister, Dede, survived the regime and helped continue her sisters’ legacy until her death in 2014, setting up a foundation and a museum in their name. The U.N. made the date of their death the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Read the Mirabal Sisters’ profile in TIME.