Salomé Ureña

Who is Salomé Ureña?

Salomé Ureña de Henríquez was one of the most celebrated poets in Dominican history and a pioneering figure in Dominican women's education. Writing under the pen name Herminia early in her career, she published patriotic and Romantic verse that captured the struggles and aspirations of the young Dominican nation, and she is regarded as the country's first major national poet. Beyond her literary work, Ureña devoted herself to education at a time when formal schooling for women in the Dominican Republic was extremely limited. In 1881 she founded the Instituto de Señoritas in Santo Domingo, the country's first institution of secondary and higher education for women, training a generation of the island's first female teachers. She married the intellectual Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and was the mother of the writers Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Max Henríquez Ureña, both of whom became major figures in Latin American letters. Salomé Ureña died young, of tuberculosis, in 1897, but her poetry and her educational institute left a lasting mark on Dominican cultural and intellectual life, and she remains a national symbol of both literature and women's advancement.

Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica, "Salomé Ureña" · Instituto de Señoritas historical records, Santo Domingo