Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
Looks at Barbados's experience of abortion law reform undertaken in the 1980s. The movement was led by then Cabinet Minister and lawyer Billie Miller. Documents the nuances, important moments, key strategies and major players in the reform movement, and highlights the critical role that Miller played in getting the Medical Termination Act passed in 1983. Background information on the situation of Barbadian women and the nature of parliamentary governance at that time is also addressed in order to give context to the politics surrounding the issue.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
211 p, Contents: Introduction: Historicising 'Woman' and Slavery -- Black Women and the Political Economy of Slavery -- Property Rights in Pleasure: marketing Black Women's Sexuality -- Phibbah's Price: A black 'wife' for Thomas Thisleewood -- White women and freedom -- Fenwick's Fortune: A White Woman's West India Dream -- A Governor's Wife's Tale: Lady Nugent's "Blackies" -- A Planter's Wife's Tale: Mrs. Carmichael's Pro-Slavery Discourse -- Old Doll's Daughters: Flight from Bondage and Blackness -- An Economic Life of Their Own: Enslaved Women as Entrepreneurs -- Taking Liberties: Enslaved Women and Anti-Slavery Politics -- Historicising Slavery in Caribbean Feminism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
213 p., A ollection of stories about the lives of 10 remarkable people in the region. From Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic to Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, readers will come to know individuals whose lives reflect the history and immense changes underway in these countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
346 p., A comparative feminist work that starts with a substantial historical account of the different ways that freedom, race and gender were intertwined in Jamaica and Haiti after the end of slavery.
The erasure and denial of the female body and of female sexuality in the fiction of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid represent the erasure and denial of the colonized Caribbeans by their European colonizers. The female characters of both Brodber and Kincaid, however, retrieve their bodies through various means, from education to a realization of the power of their sexuality. This retrieval of the female body symbolizes freedom of the Caribbean body from colonization.
