Women in Caribbean History: The British Colonised Territories

Women in Caribbean History: The British Colonised Territories (Compiled and edited by Verene A. Shepherd for the Social History Project, Department of History, Mona, University of the West Indies. Kingston: Ian Handle Publishers; Oxford: James Currey; Princeton: Marcus Weiner, 1999), xx + 195pp.

History has always been more than a matter of obtaining information about the past and sharing this with others. All history is political. What is the goal of adding women to the history of the Caribbean past? How useful is this knowledge and to what use can it or will it be put?

One relatively new development in historiography, emerging only in the last three decades of the twentieth century is that of engendering of history. In Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Scott (1988) observes that this new knowledge about women, which also challenges the central role played by men in the past, may in fact not be new knowledge, but old hidden knowledge which is only unfolding as a result of the re-evaluation of what counts as historical knowledge. Here in the Caribbean we are well acquainted with the relationship between knowledge, power and conquest. The history of our region, reconstructed by scholars from within, is a process only started from the 1940s onwards. The results of this knowledge are evident all around in the texts which proliferate for primary, secondary and tertiary level teaching institutions and in the new-found confidence we needed to grow as independent territories.

Writing of women into history must be viewed similarly as continuing the transparency of the past. The process of making women visible is simultaneously linked with the second-wave feminist movement. It therefore involves both an academic exercise as well as a political goal. Women in Caribbean History, edited and compiled by Verene Shepherd, intersects these constituent parts, and extends this knowledge to a much larger and, it may be argued, a more receptive audience. Initiated since the 1970s, women's history was at first written for tertiary level rather than secondary level students. While this clearly fulfilled one of the political goals of engendering history, the information and value of this new knowledge could not easily be conveyed to a more youthful population. Shepherd acknowledges in the preface that a major...