Bahamian Kinship and the Power of Women (Cambridge, MPhil, 1993)

Seven years ago, as an officer in the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Affairs, Nassau, I was struck by the high public involvement of women in Bahamian society. The officers I worked with were primarily women; the majority of those taking part in our programmes were girls. In 1987, a study conducted by the Ministry's Women's Affairs Unit and the Commonwealth Secretariat revealed that the proportion of Bahamian women in prominent public positions was higher than in countries where similar studies had taken place. In 1989, I began teaching in a small private high school. There too, girls out-performed boys, improving as they got older, while the boys' achievements declined. Young women, I realized, were being better trained to take up positions of public prominence than young men.
It seems possible that the domestic centrality of Bahamian women — the "matrifocality" of the Bahamian home — has influenced women's strength in the public domain. Roughly half the women I worked with in the ministry were mothers who had never been married, and one-quarter of my students lived with their mothers only. However, conventional theories of matrifocality shed little light on the situation: these single mothers are middle class women — white-collar workers in the ministry, or women who can afford their children's private education. Furthermore, women's prominence is considered no anomaly; my (middle-class) students, male and female alike, took it for granted.

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