Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros

Abstract

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xii, 297 pp. $32.95 US (paper). This fascinating study opens with the powerful imagery of a homeless woman delivering a child in a mule pen in St. George parish, Barbados in 1893. As De Barros notes, this woman's story comes to us filtered through the lens of T. Law Gaskin, a physician who recorded his concern over the impact such incidents might have on the island's reputation and used it to push for the establishment of colonial maternity services. Gaskin was not alone. As De Barros convincingly demonstrates, women's reproductive labour was a subject of deep anxiety among local and metropolitan officials, doctors, ministers, and newspaper editors (among others) throughout the British Caribbean in the first century following emancipation. Some worried that high infant mortality rates and low population growth threatened the plantation labour supply, while others saw the provision of maternity services as a humanitarian imperative and/or an index of civilization. These concerns led to much debate across the region, while also prompting practical efforts to develop medical services and collect statistics (chapters one and two), regulate midwifery (chapter three), educate mothers on infant welfare (chapter four), and eliminate contagious diseases (chapter five). Along the way, these often limited and disjointed campaigns pulled in a broader range of actors--from social welfare workers to grannies--who left their own mark. While the book focuses on Barbados, Jamaica, and Guyana, many themes are relevant to the region as a whole and the British colonial project in general. The book also examines population in a broad sense, providing a wealth of new information on the development of public health infrastructure, the production of colonial knowledge, the impact of malaria, cholera, and venereal diseases, reforms of bastardy laws and poor relief systems, the growth of nursing and social welfare organizations, discourses surrounding Caribbean family formation, and the expansion of American philanthropy. It will thus appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students exploring not only Caribbean and British imperial history, but also the international history of public health, medicine, demography, sociology, and philanthropy. For those interested more specifically in the themes of sex and gender, there is much offered here. De Barros skillfully traces the development of the twin discourses of the so-called bad black working class mother/ midwife (whose perceived ignorance was often blamed for infant mortality) and the maternalist white nurse matron (charged most often with civilizing the former). These discourses drew on and reinforced the colonial race-class-gender hierarchy. But De Barros also moves past these narratives by highlighting stories of working class women who challenged these characterizations and pointed to the impact poverty and insecurity had on their ability to care for their children, a fact that was only occasionally recognized by officials. …