By Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is a feminist, activist, poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, and also writes a column in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian
A shorter version of this column, titled ‘Will We Hasten Slowly?’ appeared in Trinidad and Tobago Newsday on Tuesday March 28, 2023.
“WE MUST hasten slowly,” were the words of Audrey Jeffers in 1948.
Audrey Jeffers was the first woman elected to the Port of Spain Town (City) Council in Trinidad in 1936. She is well-known for her pioneering welfare and women’s rights work, for founding the Coterie of Social Workers, and organising both regionally and nationally for better social and labour conditions for women from as early as the 1920s.
However, as part of a Franchise Committee established to consider adult suffrage for women and men over 21 years of age, in 1944, she opted to deny women full suffrage, instead supporting a minority recommendation that the right to vote should be limited to those who met income and property qualifications.
As Caribbean feminist scholar Rhoda Reddock summarises in her book Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago, Jeffers’s (and others’) middle-class politics “was largely a struggle to become the complement of the men of their class, not for all women’s emancipation from gender and class oppression.”
Such “feminist conservatism” clashed with the more radical feminist and solidarity politics of Christina Lewis from the Caribbean Women’s National Assembly. Lewis was a Butlerite, meaning a supporter of the anti-colonial trade unionist Tubal Uriah Butler, and she was the first to organise an International Women’s Day march in Trinidad in 1958. Reddock quotes Lewis in 1949 as observing that “most of the intellectuals we voted to represent our views have joined hands against the interest of the working-class.”
Christina Lewis’s observation challenges us to assess whose interests women represent when they occupy and wield state power. Is it the most vulnerable girls in our society or the most influential religious elites? Is it women in the informal sector, such as domestic workers, or employers?
At the launch of a Parliamentary Group of Women Legislators on March 23, I stood looking on with Jeffers’s and Lewis’s words turning over in my mind. It was an historic initiative by the Speaker of the House of Parliament in Trinidad and Tobago.
I kept thinking how pleased Hazel Brown, who died on September 22, 2022, would have been. For fifty years, Hazel was a leading Trinidad and Tobago women’s rights activist on a broad range of issues, from consumer rights to women’s health, renewable energy and gender policy making. She was a pragmatist, optimist and frontrunner in the feminist push to increase the numbers of elected women, their transformational leadership and their solidarity with women’s rights.
From the 1990s, she contributed to the founding of the Caribbean Institute for Women in Leadership (CIWiL) with its vision of women in public life as transformational leaders. She also contributed to the making of the first Women’s Manifesto: Ten Points for Power which set out the issues and demands that mattered to women and girls as a constituency. As well, she consistently supported women candidates in both local government and national-level elections over the next decades, aiming to increase women’s numbers to 50% with her ‘Put a Woman in the House’ (of parliament) campaign.
Hazel was famous for her commitment to women’s cross-party caucuses. She was a vortex pulling women together (and then mentoring and lobbying them while she had them in the room) with encouragement and clear-eyed recognition of how difficult it is for women in governance systems which remain male-dominated and ideologically heteropatriarchal.
It may not seem difficult to those of us on the outside, but women in political parties, regardless of how powerful they may seem, walk a tightrope in which their status in the party is deeply complicit with their loyalties to divisive and gendered class, race and religious politics, and to the party leader’s top-down power.
Sensing both Hazel’s efficacy and her empathy, women parliamentarians had huge affection for her, at the same time as, no doubt, they had to manage inner apprehension when they saw her marching toward them with her unrelenting feminist agenda and stubborn enthusiasm for her cause.
For Hazel, any women forming a Parliamentary Group of Women Legislators should start from the premise that they both share similar experiences as women and face greater feminist expectation that they represent girls and women’s interests.
This is because, over the last hundred years, Caribbean women fought not just to end numerical inequalities between the sexes in parliaments, but for elected sisters to represent and advance the rights of women and girls. Similarly, feminists outside the State fought for gender ministries and bureaus so that state power could be occupied from the inside to transform gender and sexual injustice across national life.
This is an absolutely key point. Individual women may work hard to rise in politics, but their advancement as a sex has been supported by innumerable global organisations, campaigns and trainings, including by women’s organisations across the Caribbean.
However, collaborating across party lines and state institutions on behalf of women can still be considered disloyal, too radical, or out of place, particularly in our winner-take-all Westminster-style of politics. In this context, a parliamentary group for women legislators is a bold, ambitious first for Trinidad & Tobago.
Quite often, feminist activists outside the State are frustrated at how much convincing, lobbying and begging is needed to achieve legislative and policy gains that are empirically justified and overdue. We share interests with elected women and moments of solidarity, yet also navigate containment and gatekeeping.
Impatient for change, I find navigating such polite, often-jacketed and heeled spaces to be emotionally challenging. One must genuflect to ministers, not press one’s agenda too forcefully, and applaud meagre steps ahead while wondering how much this strategy, even as it complements others such as letter-writing, organising marches or lobbying as part of cross-class coalitions, risks one’s own complicity with a hierarchical structure from which most are excluded.
At the same time, women in parliaments may feel as if feminists don’t stand up for them when they face sexist attacks, and they don’t stand up for each other across party. Public life is full of jeopardies, dividing women by class, race, sexuality and religion, and part played in the pace of change.
I tried to strategise what would connect these women legislators across party divisions. Did they share a vision of where our society should be in 50 years? How did they imagine we would get there? What political will would enable them to be the powerful allies which girls and women need?
As Jamaican political theorist Brian Meeks asks in his recently published book, After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope, “What are the legal, social and educational steps that need to be taken to end homophobia and all modes of sexual discrimination and accompanying violence directed against LGBTQ people? It is an irony of history that in a region marked by the history of slavery and indentured labour – where racism, degradation and violence were embedded into the very fabric of these societies -while the fight against racial oppression, incomplete as it is, is acknowledged as legitimate, other forms of othering, marginalisation, and exclusion remain pervasive and are considered acceptable. These, too, need to be thoroughly exorcised.”
I wondered if Christina Lewis would have felt scepticism as well as cause for celebration. For Hazel, I opted for optimism.
Yet Audrey Jeffers’s words echoed. I hoped they would not hasten slowly.
