Overview

In 1943, Janet Jagan née Rosenberg, gave up her studies in nursing in Cook County Hospital, Chicago, and her goal of serving in the Second World War in Europe, to marry Cheddi Jagan, a young man from British Guiana who had come to the USA to study dentistry. She followed her husband to this little-known British colony in that same year. In a unique political partnership, which would last for fifty-four years, this revolutionary couple charted a new course in Guyana's anti-colonial history. With a few like-minded individuals, they would create the People's Progressive Party (PPP), the first mass party in this country. Janet was a committed and disciplined stalwart of the party, holding the role of general secretary for decades and ministerial positions when the PPP held parliamentary power. By 1997, she was elected as the first female President of Guyana. Two years after her death in 2011, Time magazine named her as one of history's sixteen most rebellious women. This was no mean achievement for a young Jewish woman born in Chicago in 1920. She earned notoriety largely through the prominence she continued to receive from the world press for her support of the socialist stance that she and Cheddi Jagan took during 1950s Cold War politics and beyond. But she has remained an enigma to many. This first authorised biography probes the influences that shaped her formative years in the United States and tracks her struggles for democracy, women's and worker's rights, and her commitment to the cultural advancement of Guyana. It lays claim to the pivotal role she has played in the history of Guyana in the legacies she has left in both public spheres and private lives.

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Patricia Mohammed is Emerita Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of the West Indies. She is a pioneer in the feminist movement in the Anglophone Caribbean who now devotes herself fully to writing and other creative projects, distributing her year between Trinidad and Northern Ireland with her husband, artist Rex Dixon.

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