Women play a major role in Caribbean families. This is due to the fact that Caribbean families are structured as matrifocal. Matrifocal is “mother-centered,” where the mother has close ties to her children, whether or not there is a father. The Caribbean people value the mother-child bond above all. This type of bond is the longest lasting and eventually the child would become the “old-age insurance” for the mother. The bond between the mother and child is like an investment that will pay off in the long run. The mother takes care of the child and eventually the child takes care of the mother. Child care is also a collective responsibility rather than being targeted to the parents. This is interesting because the child doesn’t only have one mother. Sometimes he/she is moved around to different households. Caribbean children are basically raised by the community rather than just the parents.
Caribbean kinship revolves around “reserving legal marriage for status equals and non legal unions for partners of lower status.” This means that the upper and middle class men can marry women of the same status while at the same time have an affair with other women of a lower status. The men can also father the children of the lower status women. This concept allows a Caribbean man to have multiple families. This system results in the women supporting a family without male support. Caribbean women rely on other female kin such as friends and neighbors to compensate for the lack of support from the men.
Caribbean women are usually workers and mothers. “The capitalist relations of production historically denied adequate earning power to a large segment of men, making it unrealistic to expect them to be sole breadwinners.” This is the reason that Caribbean women are brought into the workforce. Women strive for economic independent and responsibility, however, many Caribbean women are often unskilled laborers so they do not make enough to support their own families. Eventually they will have to rely on men for help.
Almost all of Caribbean women work in domestic labor. This includes working in private homes or in hotels. This is the one of the limited type of work available for them because “88 percent of Caribbean women have no more than primary school education.” Other Caribbean women who do not want to work in domestic labor works in assembly plants. These plants offer low wages and inflexible hours because the pool of Caribbeans in need of jobs is vast. They aren’t even hired full time and in most cases only used for the fringe benefits. As more and more Caribbean women stay in the same field, they will always be always be dependent on men because they will be unable to achieve economic independence.
How did this dependency on men even start? Well, long ago the families were run by both men and women. The labor of a woman was just the same or greater than the labor of a man. Therefore, women were of high status. Eventually industrial capitalism changed everything by “shifting the locus of economic production away from the household into the public workplace.” The labor of men were valued more than the labor of women because they just stayed at home while the men went out to work. The work of a women was regarded as unproductive and the status of women started to decline. Actually, in the early stages of industrial capitalism, even children worked in the public labor force. If men, women, and children all worked then who would stay at home and reproduce? This was the concern so a deal was made that the men would be paid a “family wage,” to cover the cost of the women and children not working.
This industrial capitalism does not apply to Caribbean women because they are forced to work rather than stay at home. There are several factors that contributed to a unique experience of industrial capitalism on Caribbean women. The first factor is that Caribbean men were never paid a family wage. Instead, they work in low paying and risky jobs. The second factor is that most Caribbean women were influenced to work in the public labor force, which were usually low paying and low skill, and not avoid it. Lastly, Caribbean women have always been working and taking care of family at the same time. Therefore, abandoning the work force doesn’t even make sense.
Caribbean women have a much different experience than other women around the world. They are forced to be dependent on men but at the same time strive for economic independence. They also have two jobs, one as a mother and one as a laborer. Industrial capitalism changed the role of women globally but Caribbean women are unaffected. Caribbean women maintain the symbol of independence and strength due to their life struggles.
