The Politics of Parenting and the Potential for Self-Rule: British West Indies, 1938–58

This paper explores one stage in the trans-Atlantic dialogue through which structuralism and functionalism replaced scientific racism as paradigms for understanding collective human difference, and proper parenting came to be seen as essential to economic progress and social stability. When riots shook Port-of-Spain, Bridgetown, and Kingston in 1935, 1937, and 1938, the West Indies Royal Commission [WIRC] was sent 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.  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.  Elaborating on the agenda laid out at this watershed of colonial rule, over the next twenty years social science researchers and social welfare workers would seek in Caribbean family practice the etiology of the region's ills.  Thus attention to women's struggles and concern over children's physical and psychic well-being—propelled into public debate by self-avowed feminists and progressives—functioned, in context of imperial adjustment and the increasing unspeakability of race, to reinscribe the divide between the protagonists and the targets of political dialogue.