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published: Wednesday | October 17, 2007
In The Sunday Gleaner of October 7, 2007 Carolyn Cooper asks the question: "Who marginalised men?" Her rather defensive answer is: "The men themselves". She goes on: "Quite frankly, I'm not as bothered as some of my colleagues are about the 82:18 gender imbalance at the of the West Indies". Of course, she is referring to the vast preponderance of women over men. She continues: "If we're not careful, we can make female students feel guilty about their academic accomplishments. It's as if women are robbing men of their rightful place in university. But this is not the case. The underachievement of men is not the fault of women. And we should not have to small up ourselves to make men feel big".
The birth of 'Women's Studies'
Some years ago, when there was a preponderance of men at and university, the feminists were quite clear that this was the fault of men. The academic discipline of 'Women's Studies' was created to study and codify the issues, and indeed, to lobby for change. 'Women's Studies' always had a political agenda; it was a 'battle of the sexes'.
I went to the lecture at UWI some 30 years ago given by, the famous feminist. It had been raining, and there had been a power cut, and I walked into the Assembly Hall with my black rubberised. I will never forget being accused and heckled by some women at the door for coming to the lecture 'with my phallic symbol'. For some women, this battle against men has been a lifelong campaign.
Twenty years ago, when I would speak and write that the Jamaican system favours women, it would be vociferously denied by the feminists! It is as if, a priori, women must be oppressed in every way, and should anyone claim the contrary, he must be some sort of masculinist! At that time it was an article of faith that no matter how bad the imbalance in favour of females appeared, women were still being oppressed by men!
Gender trap
As 'Women's Studies' progressed, it became clear that there was a gender trap in which both women and men were caught. True liberation of women could not take place unless men were also liberated from their stereotyped gender roles. And so, two different streams developed within the movement: one which struggled for equality of the sexes (and 'Women's Studies' became 'Gender Studies' which took up the liberation struggle for both genders), and another which continued to struggle for the dominance of women over men. Of course, some of the former are really the latter in disguise.
There is a wide gender gap in Jamaica, but not all men in our post-slave society are marginalised. Errol Miller put it well in his 1986 monograph Marginalisation of the Black Male: the status hierarchy in Jamaica is: white man, white woman, black woman, black man. Carolyn Cooper is wrong. Black man has not marginalised himself, and I have never heard anyone accuse women of doing so, so there is no need for Carolyn to be defensive. A cheap unskilled local male labour force to cut cane and weed bananas has been protected for the plantation interests by the creation of a carefully crafted education system; importing cheap labour from India and China was proving too expensive.
And so, elementary education in Jamaica focused on 'manual training'; read the reports of the Colonial Department of Education. And grammar school education was not to be provided in agricultural areas. Independence came and the Vere Plains and the sugar parishes of St. Ann and Trelawny had no high school for boys [Trelawny had Westwood for girls only, and St. Ann had Servite Convent and Ferncourt (at first) for girls only].
In 1961, the agricultural parishes of St. Thomas and St. Mary got their first high schools which would admit boys (Marymount in Highgate was for girls only). The sugar parish of St. James had two schools for girls and only one for boys. High schools were built in Kingston and Mandeville and Malvern which had no agriculture.
There is no doubt that black men in Jamaica have been systematically and comprehensively marginalised, and the gender imbalance at UWI is the result. This must be a problem for educated black women who want to have deep, meaningful, fulfilling relationships with black men. The battle of the sexes has no place in the marital bedroom. More on this next week. Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
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