Gender and the Historiography of the English-Speaking Caribbean

In 1974, Lucilie Mathurin Mair completed her doctoral dissertation, the first full-length work on Caribbean women's historical experiences, "A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655-1844," at the University of the West Indies Mona; in 1993, Verene Shepherd organized a successful international symposium, also at UWI Mona, out of which emerged the collection of essays published in 1995, Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. These two events symbolize the development, over the last twenty or twenty-five years, of a significant body of work on women and gender in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean. In this chapter, the author aims to indicate some of the main lines this work has taken, and the major issues it has raised.