Minerva Bernardino

Minerva Bernardino, who was appointed a representative of the Dominican Republic at the United Nations in 1950, was one of only four women to sign the United Nations Charter in 1945. At the Charter conference in San Francisco, she insisted that the document include the phrase ''to ensure respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms without discrimination against race, sex, condition or creed.''A contemporary of Eleanor Roosevelt, whose passions for human rights she shared, Ms. Bernardino joined Mrs. Roosevelt and three other women who were delegates to the first United Nations General Assembly in 1946 -- Jean McKenzie of New Zealand, Evdokia Uralova of the Soviet Union and Ellen Wilkinson of Britain -- in writing an ''Open Letter to the Women of the World'' calling on women to take a more active role in politics and government.She was vice chairman and then chairman of the Inter-American Commission on Women from 1944 to 1949, the first regional body set up to advance the rights of women.''Ms. Bernardino spoke up for women in the aftermath of World War II, understanding that life for women would never be the same, '' said Kristen Timothy, deputy director of the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women.Ms. Bernadino, born in Seibo in the Dominican Republic, was the granddaughter of a provincial governor and one of seven children in a family that was unusually liberal on women's rights.''My mother was very progressive and I was reared in an atmosphere that was, at that time, most unusual in my country,'' she once told The Christian Science Monitor in an interview. Her father also encouraged her independence.When she was orphaned at 15, her lack of inhibitions about women working led her into a career in the civil service. Meanwhile, she was studying for a bachelor of science degree.By 1929, she was active in the women's rights movement in the Dominican Republic, where she was a leader in Accion Feminista Dominicana, which led the fight for expanded rights in the 1942 Constitution.In her long life of fighting for women's and children's rights, Ms. Bernardino won many honors. In 1995, she was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Award for excellence in education in Washington. On the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1997, she was honored in a speech by Secretary General Kofi Annan, who called the commission ''to an important extent her creation.''Ms. Bernardino was also known in Latin American for her sustained opposition to strongmen -- she went into what friends described as self-imposed exile to demonstrate her opposition to the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in her own country -- and for her work on international panels dedicated to making the region a zone of peace.Minerva Bernardino, a major force behind the founding of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and a pioneer among Latin American feminists, died on Aug. 29, 1998 in the Dominican Republic. She was 91.......................................................... ............................................................ .............. Article by BARBARA CROSSETTE Published: September 4, 1998 ............................................................ ............................................................ ...........