Illegitimacy and Self Government: Family, Poverty, and Moral Reform before West Indies Royal Commission, 1938–40

In a rapid shift between 1930 and 1950, British colonial policy went from paying almost no attention to family practice among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability.  As structuralism and functionalism replaced scientific racism as paradigms for understanding collective human difference, island elites and outside observers focused unprecedented attention on the hygienic, instructional, and emotional labor that working-class Afro-Caribbean parents were suddenly discovered to be both responsible for and failures at.  Thus the pathologization of poor mothers and fathers replaced explicit racism in academic and official explanations for persistent inequality, and sexual self-control became a litmus test for readiness for self-government.

This paper explores one crucial stage in the trans-Atlantic dialogue through which this shift in public debate and policymaking took place.  When riots shook Port-of-Spain, Bridgetown, and Kingston in 1935, 1937, and 1938, focusing metropolitan attention on Great Britain’s colonial possessions, the Crown appointed a West Indies Royal Commission [WIRC] to investigate the sources of popular unrest.  Even as the white elites and island-based leaders of color who testified before the WIRC disagreed over fundamentals of political economy and future governance, they coincided in linking parental irresponsibility (poor women’s willingness to bear children; poor men’s unwillingness to support them) to the poverty of the islands.  Thus the question of the lower-class family as social incubator entered into the WIRC’s deliberations, findings, and recommendations.  The causes and consequences of illegitimate births had been transformed from matters of personal morality into matters of collective political capacity.