Counting Women's Caring Work: an Interview With
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Counting Women’s Caring Work: An Interview with Andaiye David Scott Small Axe, Number 15 (Volume 8, Number 1), March 2004, pp. 123-217 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/54181 Access provided at 2 Jun 2019 14:07 GMT from University of Toronto Library Counting Women’s Caring Work: An Interview with Andaiye David Scott Upon an evening like this, mother, when one year is making way for another, in a ceremony attended by a show of silver stars, mothers see the moon, milk-fed, herself a nursing mother and we think of our children and the stones upon their future and we want these stones to move. —Lorna Goodison, “Mother the Great Stones Got to Move” PREFACE uring the 1970s when the Caribbean generation of 1968 undertook the struggles for the revolutionary transformation of our societies, they formed political orga- nizations—sometimes formal political parties—through which to mobilize the Dmasses of the population and to confront the apparatuses of the neocolonial order. Th e Workers’ Party of Jamaica, the Working People’s Alliance, and the New Jewel Move- ment were among the more prominent of these revolutionary organizations. Shaped in varying degrees by Marxism (and sometimes by Leninism), their overall goal was state power, and a good deal was surrendered to the anxieties and immediate strategic (and security) instrumentalities involved in pursuing that pressing objective. Th e problematic Small Axe 15, March 2004: pp. 123–217 ISSN 0799-0537 of gender was one of these (race, of course, was another). Needless to say, there were women in these organizations, sometimes in positions of leadership, sometimes taking exception to the sexism and masculinism of the men at the helm. But “gender” as a ssmallmall category of historical understanding and political intervention was largely invisible, or aaxexe at least it seemed always dependent upon the “fi nal instance” of the economic and class. Like race, the relative autonomy of gender had yet to emerge as a distinctive zone of social criticism. By the mid to late 1980s, however, the whole landscape of political opposition in the Caribbean was in a state of considerable upheaval. Sheltered by the new political context of international capital (these were the Reagan/Th atcher years, remember), the politi- cal right in the region reasserted itself with great ferocity, and the left began to spiral into crisis. Th e assassination of Walter Rodney; the collapse of the democratic socialist experiment of Michael Manley; and most damaging of all, the implosion of the Grenada Revolution and the US invasion—these seemed to mark the beginning of the end of the Caribbean left as a revolutionary project. And yet, in a very curious way, this period of left decline was at the same time a period of remarkable growth and transformation in Caribbean feminism; it was a period in which women’s organizations and networks that were independent of male-centered political formations emerged—the Caribbean Asso- ciation for Feminist Research and Action, for example—and they set about recasting the agenda of women’s activism. In short, “gender” emerged as a visible category of criticism, and in so doing destabilized the very idea of radical politics. But there is a sense in which this is paradoxical. Th e context is one in which the hope of an alternative to capitalism is rapidly receding, and a politics of identity is displacing a politics of social transformation. Moreover, it is a context in which transnational capi- tal is focusing surplus-value extraction on women’s labor (in free trade zones, in service industries, and so on); and therefore capital itself now has a vested interest in the question of women in economic development. In other words, just as what constitutes “politics” and the normative consensus on its “progressive” direction becomes ambiguous, “gender” emerges as a site for the proliferation of NGO development work. And as the Age of Projects arrives, the old political left, both men and women (understandably looking for sources of income in a hostile neoliberal environment), are urged to transform themselves into technical experts writing assessment reports for international funding agencies. Th is is not the whole story, obviously, but it is an important part of it. And one member of that insurgent Caribbean generation of 1968, who, from the mid-1980s onward, became preoccupied with thinking through the distinctive predicament of gender, is Andaiye. It is hard to imagine anyone who more completely embodies the 112424 antinomies and complexities of the discontinuous history that joins the politics of class in the 1970s to the politics of gender (and indeed also to that of race) from the 1980s and 1990s onward. A child of the Guyanese 1950s when great hope for decolonization was transformed into great despair in ethnic rivalry; and an adult of the Guyanese 1970s DDavidavid SScottcott when that despair began to rekindle (for a while) new hope in revolutionary futures, Andaiye is a restless, embattled, and uncompromising woman whose impatience with stupidity is legendary. Andaiye is of course an activist for social transformation. Th is, so to speak, is her vocation, and her style of intellectual and political engagement is shaped by the necessi- ties of her circumstance no less than by the vicissitudes of the political moment. But this vocation, it needs to be underlined, is of a certain sort. Her practice is not mere activism, but rather what Continental Marxists used to call praxis. In other words, Andaiye is a social critic of the concrete. Th is is her gift: she is a public intellectual (as opposed to an academic one) whose proximity to a world-to-be-changed is never measured in more than the distance between the sisters she marches with, and whose practical engagements are always saturated with an internal refl exiveness, a systematic language of criticism. For Andaiye, gender stands at the center of a dialectics of the concrete (to use Karel Kosik’s famous phrase) whose principal term is “labor,” by which she understands not merely the activity of factory workers but the whole activity involved in the formation and transformation of human life, the starting point of which is women’s caring labor. For her, all women, whether or not they do waged work, do unwaged caring work (this is a conception she borrows from the work of Selma James). For Andaiye, therefore, the historical—and consequently the political—question of gender turns on locating the distinctiveness of women’s caring work within the enlarging framework of productive labor. Th is, as I understand it, is the point of counting women’s work, of identifying it in its variously embodied and quantifi able concreteness and actuality—all of it, including that which is typically considered unquantifi able. To call this mode of comprehension and action—counting women’s caring work—reductive is to miss the strategic lesson it seeks to teach, the complex conception of work and capital it depends on, and the futures of community it aims to value and embrace. Formerly Sandra Williams, Andaiye (“a daughter comes home”) was born in Georgetown, Guyana, on 11 September 1942. She is an inspiration to many, those who agree with the details of her understandings and those who do not. Her commitments are passionate. But commitment is too slight a word for the virtues of courage and integ- rity and humor and resolve and irony she brings to her outspoken engagement with the varied faces of dominant power. A founding member of the Working People’s Alliance, 112525 a cofounder of Red Th read, and a member of the Women’s International Network for Wages for Caring Work, the Global Women’s Strike, and Women Against Violence Everywhere (WAVE), Andaiye has been actively involved in the critique of, and mobili- ssmallmall zation against, the cynical violence disfi guring contemporary Guyana. aaxexe THE INTERVIEW The People’s Child David Scott: Andaiye, you’ve described yourself as coming from an urban Afro-Guya- nese middle-class family. Tell me a little bit about your parents. Where were they edu- cated? What did they do for a living? Andaiye: Th e minute you say that I realize that when I say that I come from an urban Afro-Guyanese middle-class family I’m only talking part of the truth. My father’s family would have come from the country, from a rural area where his father was a teacher— certainly what in the context of the countryside would have been an important person among Black people. Th en my father [Frank Williams] came to town as a child to go to school. And eventually his other brother and his sisters came as well. My mother’s story was a little more peculiar. When Walter Rodney was doing his History of the Guyanese Working People,¹ and he was looking for Black middle-class men of a few generations ago, he discovered what would have been my great-grandfather, Cornelius B. Carto, who was one of the fi rst Black head teachers. But that doesn’t quite describe who my mother [Hazel Williams, née Carto] was. On the other side, my moth- er’s mother was very light-skinned, the product of what in those days would be called a mulatto woman and a white man. Poor, and growing up with her unmarried mother and her Black grandmother, she married into what really was the urban Black middle class, to a man who worked as an accountant at a company in town. Both sides of the family would have thought their side could do better, hers, in terms of color; his, in terms of class.