Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery by Juanita de Barros (review)

This fascinating study opens with the powerful imagery of a homeless woman delivering a child in a mule pen in St. George parish, Barbados in 1893. As De Barros notes, this woman’s story comes to us filtered through the lens of T. Law Gaskin, a physician who recorded his concern over the impact such incidents might have on the island’s reputation and used it to push for the establishment of colonial maternity services.

Gaskin was not alone. As De Barros convincingly demonstrates, women’s reproductive labour was a subject of deep anxiety among local and metropolitan officials, doctors, ministers, and newspaper editors (among others) throughout the British Caribbean in the first century following emancipation. Some worried that high infant mortality rates and low population growth threatened the plantation labour supply, while others saw the provision of maternity services as a humanitarian imperative and/or an index of civilization. These concerns led to much debate across the region, while also prompting practical efforts to develop medical services and collect statistics (chapters one and two), regulate midwifery (chapter three), educate mothers on infant welfare (chapter four), and eliminate contagious diseases (chapter five). Along the way, these often limited and disjointed campaigns pulled in a broader range of actors — from social welfare workers to grannies — who left their own mark.

While the book focuses on Barbados, Jamaica, and Guyana, many themes are relevant to the region as a whole and the British colonial project in general. The book also examines population in a broad sense, providing a wealth of new information on the development of public health infrastructure, the production of colonial knowledge, the impact of malaria, cholera, and venereal diseases, reforms of bastardy laws and poor relief systems, the growth of nursing and social welfare organizations, discourses surrounding Caribbean family formation, and the expansion of American philanthropy. It will thus appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students exploring not only Caribbean and British imperial history, but also the international history of public health, medicine, demography, sociology, and philanthropy.

For those interested more specifically in the themes of sex and gender, there is much offered here. De Barros skillfully traces the development of the twin discourses of the so-called “bad black working class mother/midwife” (whose perceived ignorance was often blamed for infant mortality) and the “maternalist white nurse matron” (charged most often with “civilizing” the former). These discourses drew on and reinforced the colonial race-class-gender hierarchy. But De Barros also moves past these narratives by highlighting stories of working class women who challenged these characterizations and pointed to the impact poverty and insecurity had on their ability to care for their children, a fact that was only occasionally recognized by officials. White British nurses also at times engaged in romantic relationships that threatened their perceived “purity.” As a result, we are provided with a nuanced understanding of both the power and contradictions behind gender discourses.

De Barros also explores the complicated positioning of middle-class Afro-Caribbean women who worked as social workers and nurses in the early twentieth century, either alongside white women or within “racial uplift” organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia). De Barros argues that despite interests that differed from those of colonial elites, these women at times engaged narratives of working class “ignorance” and rarely challenged the maternalist approach, instead seeking to carve out their own space within the realm of respectability. While this fits with Anne Macpherson’s findings in her fascinating study of Belize’s Black Cross Nurses, work by Honor Ford-Smith and Barbara Bair suggests there may have been more space for women’s assertiveness within these organizations in other contexts. Certainly, by the 1930s some prominent Garveyite women like Madame M.L.T. de Mena Aiken were drawing attention to taboo subjects like abortion and referring to voluntary parenthood as a...