The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

We inhabit a place that does not easily fit with ascribed roles, though many impose all the weight of Western constructs and constrictions on the behaviour of Bahamians.

Historically, Bahamians had different gendered roles in order to survive. Funnily enough, many people the world over had different gendered roles. The idea of masculine and feminine behaviour as we now understand it has developed since the 18th and late 19th century imposition of Victorian realities on British subjects. This is perhaps an exclusive examination of the former British world, but it really does demonstrate some facts.

When at the end of the 18th century, in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first feminist treatise, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, it challenged misogynistic and paternalistic stereotypes of women that kept them imprisoned in strict structures of female virtue. The system had made women objects of male attention. That means they were conversation pieces, they had to have talents and they had no rights on their own. When they got married their husbands inherited all the worldly possessions. They were not educated because it was seen as being too much for their minds to handle, and they had no rights to their children.

Victorian principles dictated that women were there to be seen and not to be agents. They had to be pretty. Men owned women and could do as they wished with them. Men only ever sought the company of women for procreation, not for intimate intellectual relations. Men sought out the company of other men for intellectual stimulation. However, the level of violence against women was lower than we now experience.

Later, Victorian experts argued that women did indeed have the capacity to think. There ensued a long, hard-fought battle for women to be able to be the parent to their children. If a woman displeased her husband in that time, he could kick her out and take her children from her as they were his children. She did not count.

How far we have come! The Bahamas, as much as there is this pervasive Old World paternalist Victorian and subtly violent air about the (former) colony, never really fit into those Victorian strictures. Firstly, as blacks in a white system, Bahamians could not fit into those strictures because blacks were not humans and so could not be respectable. Women were sexualised objects for breading, as were black men: they had to keep up the slave stocks. They did not own their own bodies. The nuclear family Bahamian lore talks about was disallowed to most black Bahamian families. In fact, they would still have been chattels to the colonial planters and their governors and lords. Family and other structures, it must be underlined, were for the most part, not for chattels. Let’s be real, women were treated extremely badly. Let’s also face the truth, so were black men. Goodness, let’s be more real, all men and women who were not of the leading classes were subjects and so oftentimes less than human. The history we hark back to is not a nice place. The Bible was used to keep those same non-people happy and subdued so that the leaders could dominate quietly. That domination was not gentle though. It was savage and brutal and the scars are carried deep within the physical and emotional bodies of the former enslaved as well as the enslavers.

Meanwhile, Bahamian relations did not follow those old Victorian models because they couldn’t. The morality that is so boasted about was a tool to keep women disempowered and men exiled from their families and themselves.

Black, working-class women had huge burdens placed on their backs and they struggled with not being killed by them. They survived, but their lack of ability to express love or time for compassion often meant that the next generation had other scars. They could not be soft in the Victorian sense, nor could they be gentle. They were workhorses, to use Zora Neale Hurston’s words.

As they emerged from the yoke of exploitation, they became man, woman, mother and father in their homes. Homes were built around women kinship networks where men held little sway. There would be an old woman who led the family and she had her daughters and granddaughters follow her. Aunties, cousins and sisters would all work together to survive the hardships of the times. Men were not present for the most part, so they could not be counted on. As breeders, created for the sole purpose of bolstering stocks, they did little more. They could labour in the fields, but they were never created to be responsible in the family.

Of course, this changed with time, but in general, the old paradigms of damaged masculinity continued to rule much of male behaviour and society’s expectation of men.

Jamaica Kincaid, Antiguan American writer, argues that while in slavery, blacks were noble and exalted, but they soon became normal folk after emancipation because they were no longer visibly oppressed. This story of how good things were and how noble communities were seems to have immortalised itself in many Bahamian’s minds and their fiction is that those days were the best days ever.

There was certainly a system in place that was matriarchal or matrifocal and worked within a wider patriarchal world that chose to refuse those same black women the ability to truly be humans.

We must realise the dangers of perpetuating the exalted black male story where women were protected and knew their place as if it were the only story, because most women functioned as man and woman, mother and father, and were barred from full participation in the male-dominated world. Suddenly, we choose to disarm the ugly part of history and to memorialise it as a time when women were treated with respect and were empowered.

How does being exploited and enslaved and then seen as a chattel equate to being respected? Why do we wish to impose roles on historical Bahamian women that they were never really allowed to play? Are women now saying that girl children should not be educated to the same level as their brothers?

One irony of this is that many of the women crying out against women having access to rights are the very women who run their homes like a kingdom and shall not be crossed.