The Depiction of Black Womanhood in Jamaican Writing Between 1900 and 1950.
News
Women
stone breakers
Hammers and rocks
Tired child makers
Haphazard frocks
Strong thigh, Rigid head
Bent nigh
Hard white piles Of stone
Under hot sky
In the gully bed.
No smile, No sigh, No moan.
Women child bearers
Pregnant frocks
Willful toil sharers
Destiny shapers
History makers
Hammers and rocks.
Caribbean feminists have been concerned with the perception of the West Indian woman in West Indian writings. In the English-speaking Caribbean, male writings are being reevaluated from the point of view of feminist debates. Writers have been subjected to feminist analyses and broad historical examinations of literature are undertaken. In the early part of the twentieth century, Jamaican women enjoyed a great deal of independence. They were both economically and sexually independent, in sharp contrast to women in post-Victorian England. Their independent lifestyle had its origins in the social patterns evolved during slavery. As feminist Caribbean historians argue, in the West Indies, slave-owners disregarded on purpose the traditional secondary role of women in the productive sector. So they pushed women to work as hard as men, punished women as severely as they punished men, discouraged stable sexual unions on the plantations, and discouraged female slaves to have children. Slave-owners' attitude towards family life served their own interests, for, not only did women prove better able to bear their harsh working conditions than men, but keeping slaves single facilitated selling or transferring individual slaves without difficulties. In addition to this, in discouraging female slaves to have children, slave-owners saved themselves the loss that would result from the reduction of the woman's effectiveness in the workplace and the expense of feeding and clothing a slave child until it was old enough to work.
After 1838, though Emancipation encouraged women to get married, have and bear children, yet the social pattern that evolved during slavery persisted. Both single and married women remained financially independent of men. By the turn of the century women developed a capacity to adjust without trauma to unstable domestic work and relationships, they were strong and independent. They lived independently within the community or at the head of an extended family, in which the presence of a permanent male head of household was not considered essential.
The migration of large numbers of Jamaican men overseas as laborers between 1881 and 1921 reinforced this female lifestyle. Women became the sole financial supporters of the family, and those men who worked abroad were often replaced by others in their women's affection. These conditions preserved for the women a degree of financial and sexual independence; especially that most working class women were self-employed or worked as domestics, and therefore -unlike men- were not affected by the shortage of wage labour in Jamaica.
The depiction of the Jamaican woman in Jamaican male writings was both ambivalent and constantly shifting from the post-emancipation period to the pre-independence era (1900-1950). For the dominant culture the lifestyle and traits of the Jamaican lower-class woman presented a contradiction in terms. Nearly all Jamaican writing before 1920 was obsessed with the position of women. They wanted to rationalize the position of women in terms acceptable to the dominant culture, that is, the brown educated middle class that has internalized the values of the British motherland. How could the Jamaican society rationalize the position of the working class woman who came to be perceived as simultaneously: unusually hardworking and sexually promiscuous? How can these traits be fitted in, or rendered acceptable in a dominant culture that revered -as a result of British colonialism and erosion of identity- Victorian ideals of chastity, family life, the bourgeois role of the woman as wife and mother, as divorced from the productive sector of the economy, and as tied by economic necessity to dependence upon and fidelity to a single man and as occupying a secondary role within the nuclear family!?
 
 
Rania Abdel Rahman*
* Assistant Lecturer at Cairo University. Founding member of the Women & Memory
Forum.

Latest News