Rhoda Reddock
10th W. G. Demas Memorial Lecture
Tuesday 26, May 2009
Part 1
Professor Reddock is a distinguished Caribbean academic and the holder of the Seventh Caricom Triennial Award
I would like to begin by thanking my former campus Principal, Prof. Dr. Compton Bourne, Governor of the Caribbean Development Bank for the invitation to address this distinguished gathering this evening in Turks and Caicos. It is a distinct honour to join a line of eminent predecessors in delivering this 10th lecture in honour of an outstanding Caribbean son, William G. Demas– someone who Lloyd Best referred to as a polycrat – “the low-key but multi-talented, all-purpose, policy-leader, the pragmatic academic in public life, who wears the technocrat’s face.” (Lloyd Best, 1998:13)
Like me, Demas began his academic career at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the UWI: that important site of intellect and praxis in the post-war Anglophone Caribbean. Joining in 1985 as a young scholar I drew inspiration from the heritage of early ISER researchers and scholars such as Dudley Huggins, Lloyd Braithwaite, Roy Augier, Elsa Goveia, M.G. Smith, Lloyd Best and W.G. Demas, scholars and practitioners committed to the region and its social and intellectual development; scholars who laid the groundwork for Caribbean social sciences, history and socio-economic policy; a legacy that I am not sure current UWI graduates are sufficiently aware of.
As we grapple with youth disengagement with society and its problems I was touched by a story recently relayed to me by Ms. Lylla Rose Bada, neé Ottley, our outgoing campus Bursar of her entrée into the field of accounting. She recounted to me her pivotal encounter with W.G. Demas when in 1962, the year of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence; he came to address her sixth form class at Bishop Anstey High school, my alma mater as well. She said – “he told us that we could be great; he stressed the need for nationalism and made us feel that we could make a difference.” The young Lylla Rose Ottley, then a Spanish, French and Latin student, decided to switch her focus to read economics at The University in London so that she could be useful to the new nation. While reading economics she discovered her facility with numbers and did a double major with accounting and the rest is history. Oh that W.G. Demas were around today to once more reach out to young people, pulled in so many directions by the unfettered and unregulated technological revolution of this period – to provide them with a raison d’être beyond their own personal achievement.
In my presentation this evening I reflect on the historic conjuncture at which we are currently located and ponder at the possibilities and opportunities now open to us. In doing so I look backwards in order to look forward and draw on my own experience of gender analysis in doing so.
Understanding Gender
Gender is now a word that is bandied about and liberally used by many in various contexts. It is one of these things that everyone feels that they instinctively understand because‚ we all have a gender. As a result few seek to properly examine, read and reflect upon what it actually means. For example, it is now popular on survey questionnaires and government forms to replace the word ‘sex’ with the word ‘gender.’ Maybe they assume that gender is the modern word for sex (which it is not!). As someone who has been privileged to work in this field for close to thirty years, I am continuously humbled by its complexity and by its rich possibilities for enabling a deeper comprehension of so much of the human condition.
The more we study this phenomenon the more we are fascinated and realize how much more there is still to know. But many in our region, possibly including some of you here this evening, have resisted the urge to learn more. This is partly out of fear; because gender will certainly change your way of thinking and of understanding yourself; the society and the world; your relationships; body and sexuality. But also partly because gendered knowledge is transformational and necessitates that we re-think much of what we have accepted in the past and much of what we are currently doing.
The interesting thing about gender though is that although we may not be conscious of it, virtually all of our actions, our thoughts and our beliefs are gendered. This is because human beings are gendered beings.
Sex/Gender identity is possibly the most fundamental identity that we possess. Human beings find it difficult to relate to persons outside of a gendered context, hence the very first question we ask of new parents is – is it a boy or a girl? This is because we have no knowledge of how to relate to persons outside of gender. This in some ways also accounts for our discomfort with sex and gender ambiguity and diversity, but this is the subject possibly for another lecture in another place. For now I will simply define gender as I understand it as – the social, cultural and historical constructions of masculinity and femininity and the related power relations or the social determinants of what it is to be a man or woman which may vary with social, cultural and historical contexts and the unequal power related to this.
The term gender assumed this new meaning with the emergence of the new feminist theory and scholarship of the 1970s – 1980s. It was used to facilitate an analytical and conceptual distinction between the biological differences of being ‘male’ and ‘female’ and the socially constructed or socially determined differences and meanings attached to ‘masculinity’ and femininity’. These scholars therefore established a conceptual distinction between sex which was seen as biological or anatomical and gender which was seen as social.
What was also important is that the social value attached to masculinity and femininity was and is not equal. Masculinity and maleness has always been valued more highly and seen as superior to femininity and femaleness, even today with the improvements in women’s situation. The specifics of various ‘gender systems’ however vary from society to society, shaped by factors such as ethnicity, class and economics, religion and belief systems, ability and disability and so on, with all of these factors interacting with each other with diverse outcomes.
In 2004, the Centre for Gender and Development Studies of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, collaborated with the Division of Gender Affairs of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in creating a draft National Gender Policy for Trinidad and Tobago. In the introduction to that document we noted that:
What has proved to be a deterrent to the smoother passage of ideas pertaining to gender equality in international and regional initiatives is that many men (often) feel threatened by the idea of equity between the sexes. There is a view that women’s advancement often means deterioration in the status of men. [but] The lives of women and men are intimately and intricately connected. It is impossible to separate the fortunes of one sex from the other, as together they constitute the basis on which the society reproduces its peoples and itself. It is true however that as women’s lives change, men’s lives will also change. The new studies on masculinity provide new understandings of men, their aspirations and lives. These new insights open up new possibilities for men and boys, widens the options for personal fulfilment and for new patterns of interaction with women and children (NGPTT, 2004: 2).
I argue therefore that Caribbean development approaches have all been undergirded by certain assumptions about masculinity and femininity – whether they were conscious or unconscious. Hopefully with the new awareness of the last thirty years of research, theorising and practical application in this region and globally; future development approaches will be more conscious – recognizing a comprehensive understanding of gender as a key factor which should shape our inputs and be reflected in our outputs, but more on this later.
The Current Context
Our Region along with the rest of the world is coming to terms with the collapse of the neo-liberal paradigm of economic, political and social governance. It has come after a close to 20-year period where the forces of free trade and the free market described by some as ‘The Washington Consensus’ were paramount. Who could have predicted the rapid collapse of this paradigm that held almost total sway for the last two decades, two decades when it was almost considered heresy to question or challenge the primacy of the ‘market’ resulting in what economist Kari Levitt (2005) called ‘Market Fundamen-talism.’ Policies emanating from this worldview facilitated the dismantling and removal of many of the social and economic safeguards which had been established in the Anglophone Caribbean in the aftermath of the labour disturbances of the 1930s and World War II (although not to the same extent in all countries). They also opened up local and regional markets by insisting on the removal of subsidies on local agriculture and manufacturing while commensurate re-movals have still not taken place to the same extent in North America and Europe.
We are all familiar with the characteristics of this paradigm which was adhered to with almost religious orthodoxy by many – unregulated free market, privatisation of almost all sectors, reduction in public spending on health and education, the ‘negotiation’ of the social sector and the privatisation of services and even essential services like water and sanitation. This period was also characterised by a sharp culture change characterised by increased individualism, greed, consumerism, selfishness with money and wealth becoming the most important indicators of value and worth. In Trinidad and Tobago we have come up with a humorous summary of this characteristic – A for Apple, B for Bat and See for yourself. Brown’s study of the impact of structural adjustment in Jamaica already in 1994 discovered a value shift where parents and children of middle-class families in Jamaica no longer considered education to have intrinsic value, worth having in its own right, as had been the case before the IMF loan. Instead they now saw education as an instrumental value, a means to achieving a higher income and nothing more (Brown,1994:61 cited in Cain, 2008:.23).
Over this period, we have also witnessed the deterioration of social life in many quarters even as the availability of material goods for consumption – cell phones, ipods, dvds etc. increased exponentially. In the Carib-bean, HIV related illness continues to be the largest cause of death for the age group 25-44 (UNAIDS, 2008): the increasing frequency and veracity of hurricanes compel us to address issues of environmental sustainability and climate change something which as people and governments we neglect at our own collective peril.
The region is also experiencing an unprecedented increase in criminal violence, especially male youth criminality connected to a drug industry and the related proliferation of small arms; and also reflected in their distancing from formal education. Clearly, the current financial crisis is simply the icing on the cake of a social crisis that was already facing the region.
The current financial crisis and economic recession has already heralded new challenges to Caribbean governments weakened after the last 20 years. As noted recently by economist Norman Girvan:
200 million people in the world will be pushed into poverty through no fault of their own, no lack of effort on their part or mismanagement by their governments, and up to 50 million may be added to the ranks of the unemployed (ILO). In our own region, Jamaica has seen one of its main export earners, the alumina industry, practically wiped out overnight; and is struggling to fill the gap in its fiscal budget of J$55 billion, about 6% of its GDP. In Trinidad and Tobago, where the energy sector accounts directly and indirectly for 70% of GDP and 90% of export earnings, energy prices have fallen by approximately 40% below the budgeted levels since the beginning of the fiscal year; compounded by falls in energy output, in manufactured exports, and in non-energy taxes…. Barbados’ tourism earnings have similarly taken a beating this season. (Girvan, 2009)
Lessons from History
This period has already been compared by others to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Descriptions of that event which lasted from around 1929 to 1939 read in an uncanny way like reports of this depression as in this citation below:
Besides ruining many thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions, particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United States’ 25,000 banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; that depression was also preceded by a period of free-market liberalism, with little state spending on social services, etc. According to one source:
In the 1920s governments and business people largely believed, as they had since the 19th century, that prosperity resulted from the least possible government intervention in the domestic economy, from open international relations with little trade discrimination, and from currencies that were fixed in value and readily convertible. Few people would continue to believe this in the 1930s.
The Caribbean was of course deeply affected at this period, just under 100 years after emancipation and just around 13-15 years after the end of indentureship. The post-plantation conditions of poverty, malnutrition and extreme labour exploitation, were exacerbated by these economic declines as documented by W. Arthur Lewis in his booklet – Labour in the West Indies- first published in 1939. (Lewis,1977). Sugar prices fell and the independent countries of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic were especially affected.
Between 1934 and 1938 a spate of labour disturbances spread throughout the region marking a historic turning point in colonial policy and social development in the Anglophone region. Starting with Indo-Trinidadian plantation workers in Central Trinidad in 1934; strikes and disturbances continued in 1935 in St. Kitts, St. Lucia and British Guiana; Barbados. St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago in 1937; culminating in Jamaica in 1938 (Reddock, 2005). Changes in colonial development policy towards the region in the post-World War II period therefore were the result of both the disturbances and strikes in the region – that is action from below – as well as from the actions of the British colonial state Labour Party policies then strongly influenced by Keynesianism and social welfarism.
This combination of factors contributed to the replacement of the 1929 Colonial Development and Welfare Act. This earlier act had been based on the principle that colonies should have only such services as they could afford from their own local revenue (Wicker,1958:172; Johnson,1977:268). It had made available the sum of one million pounds sterling per year for the entire colonial empire. This sum, dispersed in either loans or grants, could be spent only on capital projects of an ‘economic’ – that is profit-making in nature – thus excluding any spending on ‘social ‘services, including health and education (CO,1955:4).
Interestingly, in presenting this earlier Act to parliament, the British Labour government had justified it as a means of relieving the economic depression by stimulating export trade and thus employment in Britain (Wicker,1958:74 emphasis added).
What is clear is that these new approaches may not have been extended to the colonies unless the colonials themselves, through their collection actions, had demanded them. It is left to be seen what significance the ongoing strikes and labour disturbances taking place in Guadeloupe and Martinique will be for this current era.
By the early 1930s therefore, new approaches were also becoming evident in the US- controlled Caribbean colonies of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The mini-New Deal programmes of the US government led by Theodore Roosevelt, also focused on health, education and the social sector, making British colonial social interventions in the region even more imperative. The West Indian Royal Commission (WIRC) Report made public after World War II provided the rationale for the new Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1945.
It was as a result of this Act that many of the social welfare provisions to which we had become accustomed were introduced into the region. These included – institutionalized state-funded social welfare programmes and pensions, subsidized government housing, improved public health services, expanded education, scholarships for higher education in Britain especially in medicine and the social sciences, the expansion of agricultural extension and most importantly the establishment of the University College of the West Indies, the forerunner of the University of the West Indies.
Many of the assumptions underlying these initiatives are open to critique. In many instances ethnocentric colonial views on women and family were embedded in the structure and organization of these new labour, social and education structures and systems. Importantly for this presentation, central to these policies were clear gender ideologies and assumptions about women and men’s place which deeply influenced our society in the years to follow. There was a strong rejection of indigenous family systems and no attempt to understand these on their own historical or cultural terms. Rather, they were determined as dysfunctional and every effort was made to destroy them. What resulted however was not a destruction of these family forms – they have survived until today, sometimes in quite misunderstood ways – but what also survived was a social policy which did not support them and which continued to perceive them negatively, resulting in many of the distortions and social problems which confront us today.
For example, social welfare provisions in this region were based on notions of family based on the 19th century European nuclear family model of the male breadwinner/provider and the dependent female housewife. These continue to be the basis for much of our legal system, social welfare systems and everyday social practices. In the Caribbean households are diverse, multi-generational or may be female or jointly headed – a concept that I think is hardly even considered.
It is only today, with the introduction of gender studies, that some of us are beginning to try to understand Caribbean family forms in their own right and not simply as deviations from a Western European norm; forms that have been shaped by West Africa, Asia, experiences of slavery and indentureship as well as the influence of western norms and responses to hegemonic christian ideals. In so doing we are beginning to unravel some of the complex gendered underpinnings which are constantly being re-worked and re-engineered as the social and economic context changes.
In many places in this region today women cannot access social welfare for their children unless fathers are deceased, hidden, denied or if they take the fathers to court. This often results in further distancing of fathers from their children and increasing tensions and animosities between parents, something which no doubt affects many Caribbean children today. UNIFEM Caribbean has researched and documented this phenomenon and it awaits regional implementation but in the current financially challenged situation, it may once again not receive the attention it deserves.
That period, therefore, was a critical one for the region. On the one hand it was a period when new social programmes were introduced, aimed at supporting the vulnerable in society while, on the other, it was important in re-shaping gendered structures and systems in this region from the standpoint of colonial domestic ideologies.
There are a number of issues that emerge from this discussion so far. The first is that unfettered, unregulated liberal economic policies, lend themselves not only to eventual financial collapse but also to immense social crisis. Second, our region has tended in both the colonial and post- colonial period not to be a determinant of its own social and economic fortunes. Although the world is today even more interrelated than ever before and no country can exist on its own; especially ‘small’ economies such as ours, maybe it is time that we develop more confidence in our indigenous intelligence and creativity and in our own possibilities; learning from global experiences but also believing and trusting in ourselves; thinking before we jump on every passing economic bandwagon.
The question now on the table has to be: (1) what lessons can we learn from these two historical experiences; ( 2) how do we, as a region, use this knowledge to move forward into this new era; and (3) what part can gender analysis, policy and planning play in shaping this new paradigm for the rest of this century?
