A NECESSARY SPACE OF REFLECTION AND OF IDEAS TO EXPLORE
MARCH 8 was highlighted International Women’s Day. This actually had its genesis in 1911 Denmark and was necessary in context to be celebrated in Europe first. I was brought up in a matriarchal society and though damaged by slavery, still retained structures that enabled functional systems of management and survival. Most of this article will revolve around experiences that I have lived and witnessed. Enslaved Africans came here from predominantly matriarchal societies; Indo Guyanese from a patriarchal society; Amerindians are a component of both. With Europeans, differences prevail between Iberian and Nordic concerning the identified social systems.
These systems identified the inherent values, the conflicts and the extremities that inspire the impetus for change among women from different groups. There’s a saying in Creole culture that “Mother dead family done” because mothers play a healing part most times in family conflicts between siblings. This of course is not a perfect formula, and there have been times recorded where emotional conflagrations erupted with fatal consequences with mothers that tip the balance for reasonable consensus into dictatorial assertiveness.
This happened to memory on the East Coast where the male involvement and opinions were ignored and women folk gathered together to enforce a situation that backfired with dramatic consequences; of course, there are situations where a logical input from another legitimate pool of experience should be consulted.
The female arena of employment in the social conflict-ridden beginnings of modern Guyana (1850s-1940s) yielded more opportunities that that of their male counterparts. As a colony, higher education that would lead to a ‘middle-class’ category of public or private-level earning capacity, (the social pretensions and attitudes that were added to the term ‘Middle Class’ were also adopted from British class stratifications) lay in the then ‘Mother Country of England.’
The means towards this lay in hard-earned financing, while men were restricted to being stevedores, policemen, coopers and other not-so-wide artisanships with fixed wages, that often led to the many labour upheavals, women were needed to sustain the colonial and emerging mercantile and merchant class. Jobs like Washer-women, that may have had an additional starch and Ironing maid, house-cleaning, kitchen help, child care and nanny services were open to women; womene were also involved as cane harvesters on the then estates. Traditional village mid-wives performed alongside the emerging medical institutions and would be in the numerical high-end group employed as ward maids, nursemaids, cleaners and the laundry of hospitals, to this day.
This was the workforce where the savings emerged from, that would send a significant percentage of the first sons and daughters of the Creole society to England to be certified as Lawyers, Doctors, in Civil Engineering etc. The husbands or spouses of that category of the mainly female workforce took care of the rent, mortgage, food, clothing, school books and day-to-day sustenance of the home, in the villages, and the difficult life in the early overpopulated townships. There is a popular story I was told as a child that harkens to that era. “The house Maid enquired of the Mistress if she could have the latter half of the day off.
The Mistress appealed, that her son was coming home as a Doctor on the ship from England, she then enquired what would the maid have that important to be absent on this day in particular? The Maid responded that her son was also coming home on the same ship as a civil engineer. Some storytellers say that the maid was fired; others said that an amicable compromise was made. My wife knew the story too; her inherited take was that the Maid had served the Mistress and her son and family a sumptuous meal on a well-organised table. Then asked to be excused, because her son had also arrived on the same ship as an engineer and she would like to be with him.” Somehow, this story is rooted in events, or an event, circulated and retold but never made it to the newspapers of the day; but seems rooted in defining the complex nature of an era with factual elements, which we cannot dismiss as pure imagination.
Pregnancies, including my mother’s with me, and other siblings must be noted, if the hour came and the mother was some miles out of Georgetown, in the 1950s/’60s then hers and the child’s life would depend on the skills of the village mid-wife and their methods, honed and perfected over centuries in the name of sacred life, refined here and there, I owe my life on earth to a mid-wife now passed on named ‘Nurse Charles’ at Mahaica. Family would have to come up most likely with the train service from old Georgetown to see the newborn, and possibly take the child on its first tour. These women brought into the world generations of citizens, so I salute the mothers of the nation all and honour their profound contributions. To them, I say ‘Thank You’.
