Nevisian Women's Gender Consciousness: Content and Sources

To me, women in Nevis are in such pain. And that's all I see. I say it all the time: they're in such pain! (Forty-three-year-old secondary schoolteacher) The women of Nevis are not unique in being "in pain." Like most women of the world, they are emerging from a fairly recent system of taken-for-granted patriarchy. Like many women, too, they are emerging from a colonial situation that devalued their culture and was designed to perpetuate their disempowerment. But they are emerging with a unique set of skills and traditions, some from their African heritage, some from their efforts to reconcile the European values imposed on those West African traditions by the English colonizers, some from having survived one of the harshest slavery systems in the Western hemisphere, and some from the extraordinary "migration culture" of the island of Nevis. With those skills and through the lens of that history as it is confronted by the international movement of women against patriarchal injustices, Nevisian women are defining for themselves what they want for themselves.