Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-independence Guyana

Abstract

This essay argues that the rise of Guyana's Red Thread Women's Development Organisation in the mid-1980s was precipitated by the establishment of a hegemonic political culture through the regime of President Forbes Burnham. Utilizing both Aldon Morris's (1992, 2001) notion of 'opppositional consciousness' and Raka Ray's (1999) typology of 'political fields' the author finds that the founding members of Red Thread were engaged in a struggle to redefine the political culture in Guyana. Through its mobilization of women across the divides of race/ethnicity, class, religion, and geography, Red Thread was a key site for rethinking the nature of the political structure for women's politics and women's empowerment. The essay places the emergence of Red Thread within a critical review of Guyanese women's mobilization and organization in trade union movements and women's auxiliaries to established political parties through the Colonial and post-Colonial eras.

Keywords:

• Women's activism/movements
• grassroots women – Caribbean
• middle-class women – Caribbean
• East Indian women – Caribbean
• Afro-Caribbean women
• Guyana politics

Acknowledgements

The research for this essay was undertaken under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Women's Studies Program at UCLA. The University of California Humanities Research Institute, the American Association of University Women, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis, and the Women & Gender Studies Program at UC Davis supported writing and analysis of this research at various stages. The author would also like to thank several generous people for their comments and suggestions, especially Gilda L. Ochoa, Karla Slocum, Barbara E. Smith, Janet Momsen, M. Bahati Kuumba, Monica White, Patricia Rodney, Nick Crossley, and Tim Jordan. And, most importantly, thanks are extended to the women of Red Thread who shared their stories with the author.

Notes

 1. ‘East Indian’ is a racial/ethnic category used to describe the descendants of indentured servants brought to Guyana from various parts of the Asian sub-continent known loosely as India to work in agriculture after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The term ‘East Indian’ refers to peoples with roots in north or south India and was historically used by Europeans to differentiate from ‘West Indian’ (Allsopp, 1996). I use East Indian and Indian interchangeably.

 2. Exceptions to this are the studies done be Peake & Trotz (1999), Peake (1993), Kilkenny (1988, 1992) and Woolford (1991).

 3. The use of racial/ethnic is borrowed from Williams' work on Guyanese cultural politics – Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (1991). She argues that by using a slash, we avoid conflating race and ethnicity into one system. The two have separate and distinct meanings, but are interrelated in the dominant discourse in such a way that talking about one without the other is misleading, but conflating one onto the other is a failure to destabilize the hegemonic system (see Williams, 1991, pp. 152–154).

 4. Guyana, sometimes referred to as ‘the land of six peoples’, is populated by people of East Indian (Indian), African, Portuguese, Amerindian (Indigenous), Chinese, and Anglo-European descent. In addition to these racial/ethnic categories, Williams (1991) identifies at least seven additional named and recognized racial mixtures. Politics in Guyana has revolved largely, however, around the two dominant populations: Africans and East Indians.

 5. Resource women: Andaiye (African), Karen de Souza (‘mixed’ of African descent), Jocelyn Dow (‘mixed’ of African descent), Bonita Harris (African), Danuta Radzik (‘mixed’ of Portuguese descent), and Vanda Radzik (‘mixed’ of Portuguese descent).

 6. Community women: Faye Abrahams (‘mixed’ of African and East Indian descent), Marcy Ball (African), Joan Ball (African), Laraine Benjamin (‘mixed’ of Indian and African descent), Maxine Cadogan (African), Donna Carter (‘dougla’ – ‘mixed’ of African and East Indian descent), Doreen Charles (‘mixed’), Carolyn Croal (African), Sharon Cummins (‘mixed’ of African and East Indian descent), Christine Henry (African), Jennifer Major (African), Chandra Ramphal (East Indian), Berta Roscoe (‘dougla’ – ‘mixed’ of African and East Indian descent), Lisa Sadeek (East Indian), Dorothy Slater (African), Wendy Wellington (‘mixed’ of African and East Indian descent), and Michelle Williams (African). (Some of the ‘community’ women's names have been changed at their request.)

 7. Ray develops the following table (Ray, 1999, p. 11):

 8. As is standard practice, I will refer to the Co-Operative Republic of Guyana as Guyana when referring to events in the post-independence era (1966–present). I will use British Guiana, or simply Guiana, when referring to the colonial period prior to 1966.

 9. Woolford (1991, p. 13) states that it ‘has been suggested that the stimulus for its formation came from the announcement that Audrey Jeffers, a social worker in Trinidad, had run for a seat in the Trinidadian Legislative Council’.

10. Winifred Gaskin was a Guianese secondary school teacher who later worked with the Bureau of Publicity and Information (see Kilkenny, 1988). It is unclear what Mrs Gaskin's racial/ethnic identity was, but I would assume that she was of African descent.

11. See Peake (1993, pp. 113–114) for a discussion of the formation of the WPEO.

12. Within the PPP there remained a black radical element represented most notably by Sydney King (later known as Eusi Kwayana), Eric Huntley, Rory Westmaas, and Martin Carter. By the 1957 elections, however, they were expelled from the party and branded as ultra-left by Jagan (Latin American Bureau, 1984, p. 39). Upon leaving the PPP, they were nominally affiliated with the PNC but later formed a separate party – the Working People's Alliance (WPA).

13. One of the ways in which this was done was through the use of the ‘overseas vote’. In 1968 a law was enacted which allowed Guyanese people living abroad the right to vote in the general election. However, many of the names on the electoral list were invalid; it is estimated that only 15 percent of those on the list were actual people (see Latin American Bureau, 1984, p. 49).

14. A History of the Guyanese Working People: 1871–1905 (London: Heinemann, 1981); The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1975).

15. Kwayana (1988, p. 3) states: ‘The ideas popularised by Rodney had become enough of a force in Jamaica to lead the Jamaican government to apply a special technique in suppressing what they saw as the mischief. They waited until he had left the country to attend a Black Writer's Conference in Canada and then banned him from re-entry.’

16. Open Word was an alternative newspaper whose editors sympathized with the Working People's Alliance.

17. Parallels can be drawn to African American women's quilting in the Southern United States (Patricia A. Turner, public talk at UC Davis, 28 February 2002).

18. The Sistren Theatre Collective was founded in 1977. Honor Ford Smith, the group's artistic director, describes the origins of the group in their volume entitled Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (1987).

19. Because they had been activists within the Working People's Alliance, the resource women of Red Thread have been blocked from getting jobs within Guyana (Karen de Souza, interview). Many of the women have managed to eek out a living doing consultancy work for international aid agencies, but these jobs are usually short term.

20. A gap remained, however, between the community and resource women that proved insurmountable. The re-inscription of a hierarchical relationship between the women is partly a function of the politics of development – a degree to which dependency is built into the programs instituted (Cagan, 1999). But the class/status divides imbedded in the political culture of Guyana also shaped the relationships between the women of Red Thread (Peacocke, 1995). I explore this issue at some length in other work (Nettles, 2003).

21. In the post-1980s era, Red Thread has continued to work on women's issues in the country and internationally. Red Thread participated in the discussions surrounding a bill introduced to the Guyanese legislature in 1993 to decriminalize abortion (Haniff, n.d.; Red Thread, 1993). Individuals associated with Red Thread (primarily the resource women) have maintained a presence in the regional and international women's organizations (e.g. CARIPEDA, Third World Congress of Women, WEDO, etc.). Western and other non-Guyanese researchers interested in exploring the status and situation of women in Guyana often turn to the Red Thread Research Team to conduct ground-level surveys (Peake & Trotz, 1999). The Red Thread Research Team has conducted activist research on various issues including: sex workers/trafficking in women, AIDs, counting women's work, and domestic violence against women. See http://www.unitedcaribbean.com/redthread.html; http://www.sdnp.org.gy/hands/wom_surv.htm; http://womenstrike8m.server101.com/English/GuyanaPics2002.htm (accessed January 2006).