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[9A]

May 29, 2018

Alfonsina Storni’s 126th Birthday




Today’s Doodle celebrates renowned post-modern Latin American poet and feminist Alfonsina Storni. Also known by her pen-names Tao-Lao and Alfonsina, Storni was a prolific Argentine writer and top literary journalist who was dedicated to women’s rights and gender equality.


By age 27, Storni had authored six short stories, two novels, and a series of essays including La inquietud del rosal [[The Restlessness of the Rosebush, 1916), El dulce daño [[Sweet Pain, 1918), Irremediablemente [[Irremediably, 1919), and Languidez [[Languor, 1920), the latter winning first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize. Her body of work subsequently led her to become known as one of Argentina’s most respected poets.


Active in women’s rights since she was 16, Storni was also a member of Comité Feminista de Santa Fé [[Feminist Committee of Santa Fe], a leader of the Asociación pro Derechos de la Mujer [Association for the Rights of the Woman], and helped establish the Argentine Society of Writers. Today, Storni is featured as one of 999 women on The Heritage Floor, an artwork which displays names of women who have contributed to society and history, at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Depicted in today’s Doodle, Storni’s poem La Loba [The She-Wolf, 1916] recounts her experience raising a son as a single mother while defying patriarchal norms of time:

I am like the she-wolf.

I broke with the pack

...

I have a son, the outcome of love without marriage,

For I couldn't be like the others, another ox

With its neck in a yoke; I hold my proud head high!

I plow through the underbrush with my own hands.

Happy 126th birthday, Alfonsina Storni!