Anti-Colonial Women's Activism in Belize, 1910s–50s

Belize, or British Honduras in colonial nomenclature, gained independence from Britain in 1981 after decades of nationalist agitation in which working women were central players. This paper argues that women’s activism defined the nationalist struggle and its contentious relations with movements for colonial reform, in which middle-class women were equally prominent. It argues that female-nationalist resistance began in the difficult wartime period of the 1910s with Creole working women in Belize Town, expanded during the crisis of the 1930s to include Garifuna women from southern Belize, and that it achieved a colony-wide multi-ethnic character, including Mayan and mestizo women, in the 1950s. It argues that the most radical moment in the history of female anti-colonialism was the 1930s, when—unbound by codes of colonial respectability—they organized themselves as a semi-autonomous group within the illegal anti-colonial movement and led direct confrontations with the colonial authorities and employers.  In 1935 Creole and Garifuna working women (two Afro-Caribbean groups) gathered to launch a drive for womanhood suffrage. In so doing they imagined a multi-racial sisterhood of Belizean women empowered with citizen rights in a nation of their own—a sisterhood in alliance with, not in the service of, a future national government. The paper argues that when a middle-class nationalist leadership emerged in the early 1950s, women reinvigorated the legitimacy of women’s rights as citizens and workers within the nationalist struggle. But by the late 1950s they had lost autonomy to the emerging party machine and were combating male leaders’ efforts to de-politicize and re-domesticate them—efforts that paralleled the gutting of the movement. Nationalist women’s energies became focused on limiting the damage, even as they continued to devote enormous energy to the electoral success of the nationalist party within the evolving colonial system.