Born: 9 December 1894, Cuba
Died: 7 July 1976
Country most active: Cuba
Also known as: NA
Ofelia Domínguez Navarro was a Cuban writer, teacher, lawyer, feminist and activist who fought for the rights of women and illegitimate children. As a journalist, Domínguez Navarro espoused feminist views while writing for various Cuban media outlets, and in 1935, became Cuba’s first woman newspaper director with La Palabra. She was considered one of the country’s leading intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, along with Mirta Aguirre and Mariblanca Sabas Aloma.
She was born into as activist family with revolutionary ideals who were participant activists. Although she was responsible for her younger siblings after their mother died when Ofelia was just 14 years old, she was able to still graduate from high school. She graduated from university in 1918 with a Bachelor of Science, followed by a civil law degree from the University of Havana in 1921. She began her long professional career in women’s work, becoming a criminal defense lawyer, focused on defending prostitutes and other impoverished women. She belonged to the group of intellectuals who founded the Club Femenino de Cuba, for which she became a delegate to First National Congress of Women in Cuba in 1923. At the conference, she advocated passionately for the rights of illegitimate children and argued for the necessity of paternity testing. She was also founder of the Alianza Nacional Feminista (National Feminist Alliance) and spoke in 1926 at the Panama Congress, encouraging the formation of a broader Pan-American feminist movement.
In 1924, Domínguez Navarro founded the magazine Villaclara and served as its director. Her work was published in several other newspapers, including La Prensa, El Mundo, El Cubano Libre and El País, in addition to writing for the feminist magazine, Bohemia y Carteles.
Domínguez Navarro participated in the political movement against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, for which she was imprisoned and exiled to Mexico, where she wrote for the Nacional and El Universal, among others. In 1936, along with Matilde Rodríguez Cabo, she first proposed reforms designed to decriminalize abortion in Mexico’s Penal Code, a proposal that was at the forefront of the international debate concerning the self-determination of women.