Salomé Ureña de Henríquez: A Country's Inspiration.

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Salomé Ureña de Henríquez is one of the most influential poets of the Dominican Republic in the nineteenth century. Her roles as a daughter, writer, patriot, teacher, wife, and mother blended throughout her life, and inspired her acclaimed poems. As an advocate for women’s education, she opened the doors of higher education to the women of her period and then on.
Salomé Ureña de Henríquez was born 21 October 1850 in the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to Nicolás Ureña de Mendoza and Gregoria Díaz y León. Her father was a well-educated man: a lawyer, a teacher, a poet, and as a journalist founded newspaper El Progreso in 1853. She was born in a very turbulent time, surrounded by political uncertainty. Salomé Ureña was born after the battle of Independence in 1844, and the country was still going through tough times. She also lived through the War of Restoration of 1863 which aim to restore the government, and cut ties with the Spanish Empire a second time (“Dominican Republic: 1820s to 1900”).
She was educated mainly by her father and started writing very early on. Ureña de Mendoza continued Salomé’s education after she finished elementary school, he instructed her in literature, arithmetic, botany, and the classics from Spain, France and English. She first started publishing her work at seventeen under the pseudonym “Herminia” in local newspapers, and some critics even suggested that it was her father the author of such works (Erskine). After 1874, Salome started publishing her poems under her own name, having some of the published in foreign newspapers and included on the anthology Lira de Quisqueya (Lyre of Quisqueya). In 1878, she was presented a medal from the Sociedad de Amigos del País (Society of Friends of th...

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