End Note

The number and strength of Caribbean women’s organizations addressing feminist concerns has dramatically increased since 1980 when the idea of CAFRA was born. In 1980 we were few and most of us had little power to affect the quality of life of our membership, let alone affect national policy; Today, we are many: University Women’s Studies Groups, women workers groups active around advocacy or small businesses concerns; media watch groupings; research groups; drama and oral history groups; crisis centres; and artists’ groupings.

Indirect contradiction to this growth in women’s groups, there has been an enormous increase in the difficulties facing women in the region. As the economic crisis deprives us of services in education and health, our responsibility for domestic work and childcare increases. Sexual violence increases. Our governments base their plans for economic development on the exploitation of cheap female labour. On a cultural level, popular expression (especially in songs) asserts our ‘wutlessness’ on the one hand and the social necessity of male supremacy on the other.

The contradiction between our context and our aim affects us as individuals and organizations. It leaves us vulnerable to attacks from forces who see the increasing organization of women as a threat to their power. An example of this was a recent attack on Jamaican women’s organizations in a leading newspaper column. The article claimed that the newly formed Association of Women’s Organizations (AWO) has been formed to fight partisan politics, and that all this stuff about women’s unity is really a cover. This occurred a few days before the firing of large numbers of women workers from Free Zone factories where they had just won the right to union representation. These attacks are overt – up front. But mostly we function in a situation of covert opposition and perpetual su-su. The contradiction between the social environment and our purpose undermines the delicate trust between women of different ages, races, classes and political persuasions. Our relations to each other become mystified. Conflict and suspicion multiply and destroy.

There are a few preparatory steps we can take to deal with our divisive context. First, a general need exist for us to learn the lesions of each other’s struggles. Not just our successes. Our failures as well – which too often we conceal because of the need for power, leadership or expansion. More specifically, at a national level we are often unaware of each other’s programmes and priorities. We are certainly unaware of each other’s histories, specific needs and internal problems. We need a forum – nationally organizational growth, style and strategy in a continuing, critical and constructive way.

Just as important is the need to create a space for the mediation of internal conflicts, a space where we can reaffirm the changing motivations that bring us together as women - our common ground.

At the moment, the movement lacks the skills and the consciousness to develop non-traditional forms of communication as legitimate processes. Both skill and consciousness of this kind are necessary to deal with resolving internal problems. Linked to this is the fact that we also lack original structures and processes for decision-making and dialogue. We may have democracy in theory, but whether in practice it works is another matter. We lack the structures for articulating the ways we feel power working among us – oppressing us and liberating us in practice. We lack a clear concept of leadership, and this is complicated by the myriad kinds of informal power which exist in the Caribbean (race, religion, age, education, class). Often our creative thinking fails, and in exhaustion we borrow structures or unconsciously imitate old models – like parliamentary procedure, for instance. Here is one form which conditions content because it polarizes reason and emotion, language and action, argument and truth. We need to spend time inventing systems of communication which sensitize us to each other’s need for support and recognition, ways of bidding for, using and manipulating power among ourselves. We need a space which allows us to admit what we cannot do as well as what we can.

Our survival and potential to transform our culture depends on our creative ability to prepare for the divide-and-rule wind.

HONOR FORD-SMITH

JAMAICA

1988