Feminist Movements

Feminist movements, which largely seek to achieve the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes, have to overcome myriad hurdles in their pursuit of their goals. These hurdles can take on many forms and are, in fact, often shaped by the cultural heritage and geographical location of the particular society within which they have originated; therefore, as Trinidadian scholar Patricia Mohammed reasons in her essays “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean” and “Haiti I’m Sorry,” it is essential that one also considers the colonial history and cultural milieu of the Caribbean when one considers the issues that affect its men and women. It could be argued, for instance, that it is the “direct legacy of a colonial history” …show more content…
Likewise, it could also be argued that it is because the region has “inherited a generalized stereotype of woman in society as matrifocal” that Caribbean women are often held responsible for the simultaneous empowerment and emasculation of their male counterparts. It is easy to make blanket statements about ‘women’s issues’. It is even easy to make blanket statements about Caribbean ‘women’s issues’. Statements that do not concern themselves with context, however, are unconstructive at best and inaccurate at worst; the Caribbean, after all, does not exist in a vacuum, and if one were to treat it as if it did, no good would come out of it. Regarding colorism, that the descendants of the Caribbean populations that had been subject to the vagaries of the European colonial project see white skin and — by extension — whiteness itself as a state of being to aspire towards is neither a novel …show more content…
As Mohammed states: one simply cannot consider the status of Caribbean women “in isolation from other components of identity such as race, class, nation and from masculinity;” in doing so, one does a disservice both to Caribbean men and women, and to one’s