Where Have All the Feminists Gone: Learning the Lessons of a Long Time Passed in the Women's Movement in the Caribbean

Abstract

Introduction am not a feminist, but.... This comment is one that I have encountered often in discussions with both tertiary level students on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies as well as with men and women who are not students in a Women's Studies or Gender Studies class. It usually is offered as the preamble to an opinion expressed on the status of women, the relations of power that exist between men and women and the future of young men, masculinity and society. The comment has usually drawn me into a discussion in which I try to establish exactly what the speaker understands by the word 'feminist'. Very rarely have the explanations offered related to the denotative substance of the word, but they have been wonderfully fulsome in communicating the pejorative connotations that have made strong impressions on the speaker. According to some, feminists are, among other things: single women who have a dismally low probability of finding a man; lesbians; troublesome women who, if given half a chance will rule (stupid) men; and women whose only desire is to disrupt a God-given structure that requires men to be in charge and women to submit to their husbands. More importantly, many of these persons could not identify a person they could call a feminist. However, beyond the 'but' in the response would very often follow a series of opinions and statements which were remarkably compatible with many of the goals of feminism yet those who spoke vehemently eschewed the terms 'feminist' and 'feminism'. In its heyday in the 1970s, the feminist movement in the Caribbean brought to its operations a particular kind of militancy that identified it as something new, as a politics that was constructed on rights-based ideals. There were then persons, women, who for better or for worse, were clearly identified as feminists. Today the view from the gallery is less clear. Like the flowers in Pete Seeger's (1962) song reflecting on the futility of war, feminists seem to have gone on to a new and perhaps tragic phase of perceived uselessness. In an article written for CAFRA News in 2002, Gabriele Hosein wrote: I think that my generation of young women knows very little about the history of women's and feminist organizing in the Caribbean. We don't know how we have reached where we are today. Hosein also makes the point that feminist leadership and contribution go unrecognised and the gains are taken for granted by those who are the current beneficiaries. McKenzie (2004:413) on the way to the fourth United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1 995 had a very telling conversation with a young female tourist. Said that tourist respectfully: 1 am not at all interested in the women's movement. I appreciate what you older women have done, and am thankful for the opportunities which 1 have today. But 1 see no necessity for me to become an activist. Enjoy your conference. Clearly, it is not only in the Caribbean that there is this perception of feminism and, by extension feminists, as being passe, hooks (2000:117) makes the point that in the USA patriarchal mass media and sexist leaders have been spreading the word that feminism is dead and no longer has meaning. In fact, beyond the uncertainty about the meaning of feminist and feminism there is also uncertainty about whether there is a movement and the extent to which it has impacted the lives of women across the region (Massiah, 2004). So where are they, these feminists in the Caribbean? And is feminism irrelevant? Massiah (2004:21) describes the current status of the feminist environment thus: ....one of pausing to reflect, assess, revisit and revise before proceeding along to the next stage. Against this background, this paper seeks to conduct a brief review of the feminist movement in the Caribbean focusing on the issues and strategies used by the activists of the 1970s. It seeks further to examine the extent to which these issues and strategies have been sufficiently politicized by the academy or whether the academy has identified and carried forward new and more relevant agendas. …