From Jamaican Gleaner

Book: Engendering Caribbean History – Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Editor: Verene A Shepherd

Publisher: Ian Randle

Reviewer: Paul H. Williams

“The explosion in scholarly production on women and gender issues in the Caribbean since the 1970s, together with the growing number of women’s history courses in post-secondary educational institutions, represent both a blessing and a burden for students and teachers,” is how Professor Verene A. Shepherd starts the preface of Engendering Caribbean History – Cross-Cultural Perspectives, a reader, which she edited.

Without getting into the “blessing”, the burden of which she writes, she says, is: “It is becoming virtually impossible for most of us to keep abreast of the ever-increasing numbers of publications and to access all the readings, appearing in disparate locations, which are essential for graduate and undergraduate courses, many lasting just one semester. Students in the upper levels of secondary schools are also increasingly being expected to show an understanding of gender analysis and women’s historical experiences in the subjects they study for local, regional and international examinations.”

EMBRACED AS SOLUTION

This 940-page paperback, published by Ian Randle Publishers, Shepherd says, is a replacement for Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspectives, and “has now been embraced universally as a partial solution to the challenges [mentioned above]”.

It consists of 10 sections encompassing 54 papers that look at: historiography and methodology; theoretical perspectives; women, colonisation and representation, women and enslavement in the Caribbean; women, work and resistance; negotiating “free” society – education, health and entrepreneurship; gender, migration and identity; women, politics and the law; locating women’s voices – problems and possibilities; and, gender systems, male marginalisation and Caribbean masculinity.

There is indeed much material that is contained in this book, and to make it easier for readers, in the introduction, Shepherd gives an analytical summary of each paper. “Over its 10 sections, the reader covers a range of micro issues across ethnic and class lines and geographical boundaries under broad themes critical to the study of women and gender relations in the Caribbean,” Shepherd writes.

Written by noted scholars

The papers were written by noted historian and scholars, such as Sir Hilary McD. Beckles, Bridget Brereton, Barbara Bush, Clinton Hutton, Lucille Mathurin Mair (to whom the reader is dedicated, along with Norma Joy Lazarus-Grandison), Veront M. Satchell, Linnette Vassell, Swithin Wilmot, Verene A. Shepherd herself, and Errol Miller. Miller’s paper, Male Marginalisation Revisited, is one of four that appear in ‘Section 10’, which is about “gender systems, male marginalisation and Caribbean masculinity”.

Shepherd says the male marginalisation debate, started by Miller in 1986 is “arguably, one of the most criticised theses in gender studies” and because of the “continuing criticisms and re-interpretations of his original thesis” Miller was forced to revisit it from time to time. Yet, the criticisms can’t seem to go away, and one of his critics is Eudine Barriteau of the Cave Hill Campus of The University of the West Indies.

Barriteau argues that Miller’s thesis “is deeply flawed in its construct rendering its core assumptions more political then epistemological”. Shepherd intervenes to say that, “Her (Barriteau) critique of this theorising is equally and explicitly political and she uses this interrogation to advance feminist epistemological claims.” Such is the type of robust discussions that Engendering Caribbean History consists of, and will engender and perpetuate.

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