The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to María Corina Machado is the latest honor given to a female democracy campaigner in recent years.
In 2023, Narges Mohammadi of Iran was recognized for her crusade for women’s rights, which the committee said “made her a symbol of freedom and standard-bearer in the struggle against the Iranian theocracy.”
In 1991, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar was awarded the prize for “her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
Ms. Mohammadi, 53, and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 80, were in prison when they were honored by the Nobel committee — and they are in prison today. Both are reported to be in ill health.
Ms. Mohammadi was a leader at the Defenders of Human Rights Center, an organization that promotes democracy and women’s rights. A founder of the organization, Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer and mentor to Ms. Mohammadi, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
Ms. Mohammadi’s campaigning began at a young age. The Iranian morality police arrested her when she was 19 for having dared to wear an orange coat, according to the speech she wrote to accept the Peace Prize. (As with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, her children accepted the honor in her stead.)
After that incident, Ms. Mohammadi was arrested on more than a dozen occasions, and she is now serving a 10-year sentence for “spreading anti-state propaganda.” When she was briefly released from prison to recover from surgery last year, she was recorded on video chanting a slogan that animated a female-led uprising against the Islamic Republic: “Women, life, freedom!” She was not, as required under Iranian law, wearing a hijab.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose father was considered modern Myanmar’s founding father, was thrust into the political spotlight in 1988 when the ruling junta brutally suppressed pro-democracy rallies. She became the leader of the National League for Democracy party, which won elections in 1990 that the top brass ignored. She spent most of the next two decades under house arrest before being released in 2010.
When a new clutch of generals began to loosen the political reins, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was elected a member of Parliament and later became the nation’s de facto leader. But after her party won another landslide election in 2020, the military staged a coup. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned again, along with hundreds of other pro-democracy politicians. Myanmar is now engulfed by civil war.
Other women who have been awarded the Peace Prize for their campaigns for democracy and women’s rights include Tawakkol Karman of Yemen and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, who were joint honorees in 2011.