Since I’ve already posted Chapter Eight of my work in progress, featuring “Winifred Gaskin: A Political Woman,” I’m moving on to Chapter Nine that portrays another political woman and the first female president of Guyana (1997-1999): Janet Jagan nee Rosenberg. The white American-born wife of Cheddi Jagan—co-founder of the left-leaning People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Guyana’s first political party to garner massive support—was regarded as an “outsider” among the ruling British and local elite at the time.

When I started this book project, I did not plan on including Janet Jagan among the influential women in the formation of my social and political consciousness. As a young devout Christian, I viewed her not only as an outsider but also as a threat to religious education in our parochial schools. Though I did not share her communist ideology, I would be remiss in not acknowledging her influence in empowering Guyanese women to speak out against oppression and injustice by those holding power or authority within the home, workplace, and public spaces. In retrospect, she may well be the driving force for my rebellious attitude towards those in authority: A criticism I received from my religious superiors as a young Catholic nun.

As Cheddi’s wife and political partner, Janet’s remarkable journey is also an interesting case of what can be achieved when the male and female work together as equal partners. Here in the United States, we are still plagued by the patriarchal dominator model of organizing our society. As the world’s greatest democratic nation, we lag behind other countries, advanced and developing, in electing a woman for the top position as president. Since the 1872 elections, several American women have tried and failed. Isn’t it ironic that the first American woman to hold the position did so in a foreign country? Hillary Clinton came close in the 2016 elections. Does Nikki Haley stand a chance in 2024? We have no shortage of remarkable American-born women capable of leading our nation.

We left Guyana for Brazil in 1987 before the PPP returned to power in 1992, after spending 28 years in Parliament as the major opposition party. With her husband as Executive President, the 72-year-old Janet became First Lady of the Republic of Guyana. She was 77 years old when she was elected as Executive President, following Cheddi’s death.

Chapter Nine: Janet Jagan – The Power of a Shared Vision

Some women defy the accepted norms for women in a male dominated society. Janet Rosalie Rosenberg was such a woman. Born on October 20, 1920, to a Jewish, middle-class family in Chicago, Illinois, she grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood where her family faced antisemitism. Having a Christmas Tree was not enough to fit in. To avoid job discrimination and advance as a salesman, her Czechoslovak immigrant father changed their family name to Roberts. Those early experiences as an outsider fueled her desire to aid the poor and downtrodden. The Great Depression (1929-1941) may also have made a great impact on the teenage Janet.

Audacious during her youth, Janet rode horses, swam competitively, and took flying lessons without her parents’ permission. During her university years at Wayne State University and the University of Detroit, she became an active member of the Young Communist League. This radicalism, she recalled later in life, was also “decisive in molding [her] character into a person who despised discrimination and injustice and [joining] the long struggle as a freedom fighter in the world oppressed by imperialism and its tentacle.”

Her embrace of communism angered her conservative Republican parents. To make the situation worse, she abandoned her university studies before obtaining her bachelor’s degree. Instead, she took a nursing course at Cook County General Hospital with the aim of serving in the Second World War (1939-1945) raging across Europe.

Then, in December 1942, Janet’s plans took an unexpected turn. At a party for a friend joining the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), she met the “dashingly handsome” Cheddi Jagan, an Indian dental student at Northwestern University from British Guiana.

“It was love at first sight,” Cheddi recalled in his book, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana’s Freedom (London, 1966). “She was exceedingly beautiful.”

Cheddi was twenty-four years old, the oldest son of sugarcane workers. Janet was twenty-two years old. Theirs was more than a mutual physical attraction. Enamored with Marxist-Lenin ideology, they both shared a common interest in working for a new world order.

Janet abandoned her plans to join the WAC. Defying her father’s threats to disown her and to shoot her dark-skinned Hindu suitor, she married Cheddi on August 5, 1943, at a simple ceremony at Chicago City Hall (see wedding photo below).

Cheddi’s parents were also unhappy about their marriage. They had not seen their oldest son for seven years after he left home in September 1936 to study in the United States. They had ten other children, five boys and five girls, who needed his financial assistance to advance their studies.

While Janet stayed behind in Chicago with friends, Cheddi returned to British Guiana in October 1943 to set up his dental practice. She joined her husband in December 1943, leaving behind her family and friends to live in a strange new world, crying out for change.

Over the next ten years, she worked as an assistant in her husband’s dental clinic located in the capital, Georgetown. They had two children: first a boy in 1949, and then a girl in 1955. Though she reconciled with her father after her son’s birth, they never saw each other again. After his death in 1957, she regretted that he had never met her husband. She maintained contact with her mother through letters, keeping her up to date with pictures of the children.

Contrary to the initial fears of her in-laws, Janet supported Cheddi’s familial responsibility of providing the funds needed to send his siblings overseas—England, Ireland, and the United States—for higher education. Three brothers qualified as a dentist, doctor, and lawyer. Two sisters became nurses, one an optician, and another a beautician.

During one of his sentimental moments, her father-in-law praised her for the family’s achievements: “If Cheddi bin marry a’ coolie gal, me pickney would a’ never get a’ chance.” [If Cheddi had married an East Indian girl, my children would’ve never gotten a chance.]

That Cheddi’s family members were devout Hindus mattered not to Janet. Without a Jewish community in her adopted homeland, she faced no objections to raising their two children in Hindu traditions.

“I have no religion save the religion of equality,” she told the curious.

Janet Jagan’s generosity of spirit went way beyond looking out for the best interests of her in-laws. Together with her husband, she joined the struggle for improving the quality of life of ordinary people and for universal adult suffrage. After becoming a member of the colony’s first labor union, the British Guiana Labour Union (BGLU) established in 1919, she worked with the union leader in organizing a strike of female domestic workers for better wages and working conditions.

Later in 1946, she joined her husband and two other Guianese—H.J.M. Hubbard, General Secretary of the Trade Unions Council (BGTUC registered in 1941) and Ashton Chase, Assistant Secretary of BGLU)—in launching the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) committed “to assist the growth and development of the labour and progressive movements of British Guiana to the end of establishing a strong, disciplined and enlightened party, equipped with the theory of Scientific Socialism.” Janet became editor of the committee’s newsletter, the PAC Bulletin.

That same year, Janet also expanded her involvement in the local political sphere in co-founding the Women’s Political and Economic Organization (WPEO) together with two prominent local women, Winifred Gaskin (portrayed in the previous chapter) and Jessica Huntley. Janet held the position of president and Winifred as secretary. They aimed to improve women’s skills and encourage them to become politically engaged.

With the dissolution of the WPEO seven years later, Janet regrouped with several other women to form the Women’s Progressive Organization (WPO). Its mission for the upliftment of women included better education, greater security, higher living standards, and liberation from colonialism and poverty. She served as its president until her death in 2009.

Pressured by her husband and other political allies, Janet Jagan made her debut in the colony’s political arena by running for the Georgetown seat in the 1947 general elections for the Legislative Council. Though popular, she lost the seat to an anti-communist, prominent Portuguese businessman. Cheddi won a seat by a close margin, becoming the youngest member of the Legislative Council at twenty-nine years old. He served until 1953.

The couple’s most ambitious step came on January 1, 1950, when Cheddi’s Political Affairs Committee (PAC) merged with the British Guiana Labour Party, led by Forbes Burnham, to form the left-wing socialist People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the first party with massive support in the colony. Cheddi (32 years) held the position of Leader, with Burnham (27 years) as Chairman, and Janet (30 years) as General Secretary, a position she held until 1970. Cheddi’s dental clinic became the party’s first headquarters.

Janet remained a member of the PPP’s Central and Executive Committees until her death. She was also appointed as first editor of the newly established Thunder, the party’s official newspaper with the aim of countering the propaganda of the colonial government, the British sugar planters, and other foreign corporations dominating the colony’s economy. When women asked about her ability to handle such diverse tasks on a daily basis, she always responded: “You have to know how to manage time and how to balance family life with public and professional life.”

The PPP’s victory at the General Elections in April 1953 was short-lived. On October 9, 1953, the colonial government suspended the Constitution and kicked the PPP government out of office. Owing to their Communist leanings, the Jagans faced a constant battle against the British colonial powers, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as the sugar planters controlling the country’s economy. They seemed to have a special disregard for Janet Jagan, considered an outsider as a white American woman.

In a Top Secret Note and Memorandum to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated October 26, 1953, Lionel Luckhoo, a British-trained Guianese lawyer and member of the Legislative Council, cited Janet Jagan as “the brain behind this Red movement” in the colony. He also blamed her for perpetuating worker strikes across the sugar estates “by means of setting up soup kitchens, building up the resistance morale of the strikers and generally encouraging them to stay out.”

On October 27, 1953, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies sent an encrypted and personal telegram to the Governor of British Guiana advising that it was up to him alone “to decide the local expediency of detaining Janet Jagan, or leaving her at liberty to make trouble, but I would like you to know that there is no reason at this end why you should not detain her whenever you are satisfied there is good cause for it.”

In April 1954, Cheddi Jagan and other PPP leaders, excluding Forbes Burnham, were sentenced to six months in prison with hard labor for breaking a restriction of movement order. After serving five months in prison, first at the Georgetown Prison and then at the remote hinterland Mazaruni Prison, Cheddi Jagan was released a month earlier on September 11th for good behavior.

In August before her husband’s release, Janet was sentenced for being in possession of a secret Police Riot Manual and for holding an unauthorized public meeting. In his book The West on Trial, Cheddi Jagan claimed that they were trumped-up charges. Despite her difficulty in adjusting to the harsh prison life, she survived the five-month ordeal until her release on January 18, 1955. For the next two years, she and her husband’s movements were restricted to Georgetown only, with weekly reports to the police department.

In October 2003, when asked about her 1954 -imprisonment, Janet said: “Jail wasn’t easy from the physical point of view. But like my husband, I treasured the quiet of jail from the furor outside. I did a lot of reading after insisting that women, like men, should have a right to have books. I also did handicrafts, and my stuffed dolls and animals were sold outside [the prison].”

During the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union (1947-1991), the United States government—first under Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) and then under John F. Kennedy (1961-1963)—stripped Janet of her American citizenship, making it difficult for her to get a visa to visit relatives. In addition to dubbing her “the most dangerous person in the colony,” the Americans viewed her as the “brain behind her husband and the organizational wheelhouse of the PPP.” Unable to conceive that the son of sugarcane workers, a “coolie boy,” could have the intellectual capacity of traditional politicians, they claimed that Janet “wrote all [Cheddi’s] speeches because [she] was white.” They also falsely accused her of having familial ties with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in the United States in 1953 for allegedly spying for the Soviet Union. The baseless accusation circulated for years, even appearing in The Washington Post’s obituary for her husband, Cheddi Jagan, in 1997.

In their highly critical May 1963 article, the Time magazine called her, then forty-two years old, “the most controversial woman in South American politics since Evita Peron.” Even her personal appearance was subject to disdain: “Dowdy and bespectacled, her greying hair askew, Janet Rosenberg Jagan looks more like a suburban matron than an impassioned leftist.”

During the 1964 “reign of terror” (as described by Janet) which uprooted, injured, and killed thousands of Guianese, the PPP headquarters was bombed, killing an employee. For their children’s safety, Cheddi and Janet sent them to live with relatives in the United States. To avoid further bloodshed, Janet kept a low profile. “I had to just lie low for a long time,” she wrote later in the PPP’s Thunder newspaper.

Though East Indians made up over fifty percent of the colony’s population, the PPP lost the 1964 General Elections under a new system of proportional representation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and with international pressure for free and fair elections, monitored by the former US President Jimmy Carter, the PPP finally returned to power in 1992 after 28 years. Janet Jagan took on the unfamiliar role of First Lady and hostess to world leaders.

Janet Jagan rose in the political sphere, breaking several barriers as a female politician. “You’re never beaten as long as you go on fighting,” she once said.

In a January 1998 interview with Guyanese journalist Martin Goolsarran, following her election as Executive President, she said: “I am a hard worker and I intend to work very hard. I have always been part of a team; I have never been a loner. I have never stood by myself and dictated. I don’t believe in it…. I believe in consultation. I believe in consensus.”

Janet Jagan died on March 28, 2009, at the Georgetown Public Hospital.

In their 2012 International Women’s Day Commemoration issue, the Time magazine featured Janet Jagan among seventeen of history’s most rebellious women.