Alva Myrdal was a Swedish-American social scientist who became a prominent member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She was educated at Uppsala University and Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under the direction of her father, Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal's first publication was a study on the Swedish labor movement of the 1920s, but her most important work has been her study of race relations in the United States, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)
In this study, she argued that the prevalence of racial discrimination against African Americans in the U.S. was due to government policy rather than individual racism or economics. In 1944, she joined with her husband Gunnar to work on an influential report for the UN Commission on Human Rights, a report entitled "The Problem of Discrimination Against Minorities." Although Myrdal is best known for her work as an academic researcher and political activist, she also worked as a writer on a number of publications.
The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.Alva Myrdal
The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.Alva Myrdal
