Caribbean Issues is a weekly collection from Every day Kos. Hope you’ll be part of us right here each Saturday. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, take a look at Caribbean Issues: Attending to know the nations of the Caribbean.
Forward of the presidential election, there was a concerted effort from punditry to preemptively level fingers at and blame Black males for abandoning Vice President Kamala Harris. Some—together with President Barack Obama—predicted that Black males’s misogyny would by no means enable them to vote for or settle for a Black girl (or any girl) in cost. This has been vociferously debunked by exit ballot information, since after Black ladies, Black males have been Harris’ strongest supporters—simply as they have been in 2020 and in 2016.
A few of these fake fees received me to occupied with Black feminine heads of state—each elected and appointed in our neighboring nations of the Caribbean. If there had been some cultural norm that’s particularly Black male-related, these nations would have overtly revolted when a girl took the helm, or by no means elected them to it.
Am I saying that machismo, male chauvinism, and patriarchy are absent in our island neighbors? No. It’s a world phenomenon, and it may be lethal. However whereas our supposedly Democratic society hasn’t managed but to “put a woman in charge,” we within the States have been left within the mud by our extra superior neighbors.
Gender fairness in authorities is a matter being tracked by the United Nations, with the purpose of “achieving gender parity in political life globally.” So let’s meet among the Caribbean ladies who’ve damaged glass ceilings that we’ve got as but, failed to attain.
By now, readers of this collection must be conversant in Mia Mottley, who just isn’t solely the prime minister of Barbados, however has additionally achieved world prominence, notably round problems with local weather change.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaks throughout a plenary session on the COP29 U.N. Local weather Summit, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Mottley’s spectacular work has been featured ceaselessly in “Caribbean Matters.”
Caribbean Issues: Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados is a power to be reckoned with
Caribbean Issues: ‘Take heed to Mia’ highlights a message to the world from Barbados PM Mia Mottley
Caribbean Issues: Barbados PM Mia Mottley seen as best choice for future UN secretary-general
Caribbean Issues: Barbados’ Mia Mottley stuns the world once more, this time at COP26
Caribbean Issues: At COP27, Barbados PM Mia Mottley is a robust voice addressing local weather change
Caribbean Issues: The world celebrates Barbados PM Mia Mottley’s response to reporter’s query
Caribbean Issues: Barbados PM Mia Mottley to ship keynote at U.S. reparations conference
Iif you haven’t met them already, let’s meet another groundbreaking ladies leaders of the Caribbean. Pictured on the high of the story is the primary feminine prime minister of Jamaica, Portia Simpson-Miller, when she hosted President Barack Obama in 2015.
Encyclopedia.com has Simpson-Miller’s biography.
In 2006, Portia Simpson Miller turned the primary girl to steer a authorities within the West Indian island nation of Jamaica. She had campaigned on pledges to scale back crime, poverty, and unemployment, and through her first few months in workplace she scored record-high approval scores in public-opinion polls. A author for the Economist journal described the profession politician as “something of a breath of fresh air for a country whose politics has long been dominated by elderly men,” including that Simpson Miller, typically referred to by Jamaicans as Sista P, had celebrated her sixtieth birthday by the point she took workplace but “looks younger and has an easy, magnetic charm.”
Simpson Miller was born on December 12, 1945, in Wooden Corridor within the parish of St. Catherine on Jamaica, and attended Marlie Hill Main Faculty. She studied at St. Martin’s Excessive Faculty for Ladies, and was first elected to workplace in her late 20s when she ran for an area councilor’s seat within the Trench City West constituency of the Kingston & St. Andrew Company (KSAC), because the mixed parish governments are identified. Trench City West was a notoriously poor district and had been a Jamaican Labour Get together (JLP) stronghold for a few years. Simpson Miller’s victory within the 1974 native election marked the primary time a member of the nation’s different main political group, the Individuals’s Nationwide Get together of Jamaica, or PNP, had received there.
Simpson-Miller’s rise to the Prime Minister’s seat in Jamaica is a unprecedented story — detailed within the 2019 documentary “Journey, Break Each Rule. Marcia Rowe reviewed it for The Jamaica Gleaner :
Simpson Miller stated that she was intrigued by the title, ‘ Break Every Rule’ as she has certainly damaged some guidelines in being a fierce defender of the poor, Jamaica’s first feminine chief of presidency, and Jamaica’s first feminine prime minister. Her journey, she stated, was influenced by a variety of individuals, together with her father, when she was rising up in Wooden Corridor, St Catherine.
Fittingly, Journey, Break Each Rule begins in Wooden Corridor with a younger Portia writing her autobiography. She attracts stick individuals for example her household. The journey to the town is captured in a transferring bus. Subsequently, by nonetheless photographs and video footage, her sojourn into politics takes form. Her triumphs and successes, from being a councillor of South West St Andrew to being prime minister of Jamaica, inform the 52 minutes documentary.
Watch “Journey, Break Every Rule” in its entirety beneath.
The Jamaica Gleaner posted its personal 3-minute characteristic about Simpson-Miller in 2017.
The excellence of electing the first-ever girl to the workplace of prime minister in all the Caribbean—and the Americas writ massive—belongs to voters within the island nation of Dominica. Dominica is usually confused with the Dominican Republic, however they don’t seem to be the identical nation.
Meet Dame Eugenia Charles.
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Eugenia Charles, “Iron Lady of the Caribbean,” was born #OTD in 1919.
First girl within the Americas elected in her personal proper as head of govt–she served as Prime Minister of #Dominica from 1980-1995, the world’s third longest-serving girl prime minister. #WomenInPolitics 🇩🇲 pic.twitter.com/EDyHNWmqcS
— Admirable Ladies (@AdmirableWomen) Might 15, 2023
In 2012, CaribNation’s Derrick Deane interviewed Charles’ biographer, lawyer Gabriel Christian.
From the CaribNation TV’s video notes:
CaribNation’s interview with Gabriel Christian, creator of the guide MAMO! The life and instances of Dame Mary Eugenia Charles.
Prime minister of Dominica from 1980 to 1995, Mary Eugenia Charles was born Might 15, 1919 in Pointe Michel, Dominica. She is a granddaughter of former slaves and one among 5 youngsters of John Baptiste and Josephine Delauney. Her father was the founding father of the Penney Financial institution. Her three brothers are docs whereas her sister is a nun. Charles attended Catholic faculties in Dominica and Grenada, then, from 1942 to 1946, she went to the College School of the College of Toronto and obtained a B.A. in regulation. She continued her research of regulation on the London Faculty of Economics and Political Science. When she returned residence in 1949, she turned the primary girl lawyer on this Caribbean island.
Unpacking the Charles legacy is complicated. She was Prime Minister when there was an try to overthrow the Dominican authorities in 1981, as detailed in Caribbean Issues: Have you ever heard of the failed ‘Bayou of Pigs’ coup try?
She additionally stood by and supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, lined in Caribbean Issues: Remembering ‘Pressing Fury’—Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.
YouTuber Almira Lewis explores her background, rise to energy, and the contradictions in her legacy—in simply 12 minutes.
From Almira Lewis- Moments In Time’s video notes:
Charles’ administration is credited with facilitating the US “invasion” of Grenada, in the course of the Reagan administration.The invasion was in response to political instability and considerations in regards to the affect of Marxist parts within the Grenadian authorities. The operation, code-named Operation Pressing Fury, aimed to revive stability and shield Americans on the island. Eugenia Charles’ endorsement performed a job in justifying army motion. The invasion resulted within the elimination of the Grenadian authorities and the institution of a extra average management. Subjects lined embrace Operation Pink Canine, Reagan, Hurricane David, and extra!
Haiti has had two ladies function prime minister. The primary was Claudette Werleigh, who served from 1995-1996.
From 2011’s “Biography of a woman peacemaker – Claudette Werleigh,” from the College of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice:
The daughter of a affluent enterprise household, Werleigh was introduced up on one facet of Haiti’s social cloth, however she quickly noticed the realities of the opposite facet. The structural violence embedded in Haitian society had a profound impact on Werleigh, now identified in her life’s work as a staunch advocate for preserving insurance policies and practices firmly rooted within the wants and voices of the grassroots.
As a younger grownup targeted on justice for these caught in Haiti’s disparate social construction, Werleigh was drawn to the sector of schooling — particularly grownup literacy — and began a faculty for adults and rural Haitian farmers. Neighborhood-owned and run all through Haiti’s tumult of political violence, earthquakes and epidemics, the varsity has been open and operating for 33 years. Underneath the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, Werleigh served as secretary normal of Caritas Haiti for 10 years, coordinating aid help, civic schooling and respect for human rights.
The Kroc Institute interviewed Werleigh for its Ladies’s Peacemaker convention, additionally in 2011.
The second girl to function Haiti’s prime minister was Michèle Pierre-Louis, who served from 2008- 2009. Journalist Michael Deibert, interviewed her for InterPress in 2009.
Q&A: “The Elites Are Like a Huge Elephant Sitting on Haiti”
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 3 2009 (IPS) – Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis assumed workplace in September 2008. Born within the southern metropolis of Jérémie in 1947, she left Haiti along with her household in 1964 following a pogrom by dictator François Duvalier in opposition to his perceived enemies in her city.
[…]
IPS: Might you converse slightly bit about your background? MPL: I used to be born in Jérémie, and my dad and mom have been individuals extraordinarily devoted to the nation. My father and my mom have been raised in the course of the U.S. occupation, and that entire technology was very nationalistic, it was crucial to be happy with your nation, to like your nation, to know your nation.
My involvement began very early as a result of I used to be concerned in youth teams in opposition to Duvalier, which on the time was very harmful. There have been a number of teams that have been preventing clandestinely in opposition to the dictatorship, and I misplaced plenty of associates who disappeared.
In the future you’d hear that [the government] received them and put them in jail and you’d by no means hear from them once more. So I used to be marked by this case, and even after I went to check overseas, Haiti was at all times in my thoughts.
IPS: How did you discover your involvement within the first Aristide authorities? MPL: It was very exhilarating, at the start. Everyone on this planet was saying lastly Haiti goes to return out, lastly democracy goes to be constructed … When the 1991 coup occurred, I used to be most likely the primary particular person to offer an interview and say, it doesn’t matter what, the coup was unjustified. Aristide was our president and he was elected democratically and we’re going to struggle for him to remain in energy.
In 2022, the USC Institute on Inequalities in World Well being performed an oral historical past interview with Pierre-Louis. Right here’s a 7-minute clip from the undertaking.
From USC’s video notes:
Michèle Pierre-Louis served as Prime Minister of Haiti from 2008 to 2009, the second girl in Haiti’s historical past to carry the place. An economist by coaching, she has devoted particular consideration to bettering literacy and grownup schooling, held coaching periods for conventional midwives, opened libraries, and made public well being one among her core priorities. In her full oral historical past, she covers her years as Prime Minister and as President and founding father of FOKAL, la Fondation Connaissance et Liberté, and displays on her philosophy that has animated her work in public well being over the past a number of many years.
The complete Pierre-Louis archive contains extra from her interview, in addition to transcripts.
Deibert additionally wrote about Pierre-Louis’ elimination from workplace in Haiti for AlterPresse in 2009.
Just a few notes on the dismissal of Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis
Since she assumed workplace in September 2008, Pierre-Louis was most likely extra accountable than some other single particular person in starting to revive some stage of confidence in Haiti’s authorities and in encouraging the stirrings of worldwide funding in a nation of industrious however desperately poor individuals all-too-often written off as an financial basket case. Throughout her tenure, the World Financial institution, the Worldwide Financial Fund and the the Inter-American Growth Financial institution collectively canceled $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, whereas the latter establishment accredited an extra $120 million in grants to help Haiti to enhance such sectors as infrastructure, primary companies and catastrophe prevention.
[…]
That being the case, one may then ask why Haiti’s senate, dominated by partisans of Préval’s LESPWA political present, selected this second to oust Pierre-Louis beneath the almost-laughable rationale that, in her 12 months in workplace, she had not solved the issues brought on by two centuries of what Haitian author Frédéric Marcelin in 1904 known as “civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries, economic ignorance and idolatrous militarism.”
With the ouster of Pierre-Louis spearheaded by such LESPWA stalwarts as Senators Joseph Lambert and Jean Hector Anacasis, and with René Préval himself remaining publicly silent because the plot to take away his Prime Minister got here to its inevitable and absurd conclusion, there seems to be a proof so simple as it’s miserable for eradicating Pierre-Louis at a second when Haiti lastly gave the impression to be gaining some worldwide credibility: The Prime Minister was standing in the best way of some highly effective individuals making fairly some huge cash.
The College of the Virgin Islands devoted its 2019-20 problem of “Caribbean Perspectives” to the area’s ladies in energy. The particular version, “Female Leadership in the 20th and 21st Century Caribbean,” contains excerpts from tutorial papers.
“The Influence and Impact of Women in Leadership Roles” by Jacinth L. Henry-Martin, M.A.“Caribbean Women of Consequence: New Leadership for the 21st Century” by Nandi Sekou, Esq.”Inspiring a New Era of Feminine Political Management throughout the Caribbean by Mutryce A. Williams, Ph.D.“The Case for More Women Leaders in the Caribbean” by Talibah V. O. Byron, Esq.“Biblical Female Leaders: Trailblazers for 21st Century Women” by Valerie Knowles Combie, Ph.D
Organizations like Caribbean Ladies in Management are selling and coaching ladies to step into management roles to assist different ladies make historical past and guarantee ladies’s voices are heard in Caribbean nations.
CIWiL promotes and strengthens gender equality within the Caribbean by advocating for transformative politics and policymaking, supporting ladies in management and resolution making in addition to offering schooling, coaching and analysis.
Be a part of me within the feedback to satisfy extra ladies who’ve held, or now maintain key positions in management throughout the Caribbean. Right here’s hoping that in the future quickly, america will emulate what has been completed by our southeastern neighbors.
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