“The Misfortune of being Black and Female”: Black Feminist Thought in Interwar Jamaica

Authors

  • Henrice Altink University of York

Keywords:

feminist theory, Afro-Jamaican women, status of middle-class women in interwar Jamaica

Abstract

This article examines the views of several black, educated, middle-class women in interwar Jamaica on the multiple oppressions suffered by Afro-Jamaican women and also their proposals to undo or lessen them. It shows that although their feminist programme contained some radical elements, it served to uphold the gender status quo in the island.

Author Biography

Henrice Altink, University of York

Henrice Altink is a lecturer in modern history at the University of York (United Kingdom). She has written her PhD (2001) on representations of Jamaican slave women in discourses of slavery and abolition and has published articles on Jamaican slave women, the workings of the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica, and the border in the Caribbean island of St. Martin. This article is part of her new research project that explores notions of womanhood in the Afro-Jamaican community in the post-emancipation period.

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Issue

volume 5, issue 2 (Winter 2006)

Section

Articles

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.