Woman uninterrupted

Times change, but undying are the strength and value of a woman.

In observance of International Women’s Day, Perspective spoke with four generations of Bahamian females, whose insights about womanhood in The Bahamas are as rich and meaningful as is their place in their society.

Womanhood in today’s Bahamas is a mix of enduring responsibilities, changing expectations, evolving opportunities and distinct roadblocks.

Despite life’s difficulties, we found no shrinking violets or females wearing the victim label among those we spoke to who all urge Bahamian women to recognize their worth and to approach life unapologetically, and with a keen sense of purpose.

‘Go for the skies’

Veronica Pintard, 91, is a child of the 1930s, and with a glint in her eyes pregnant with reminiscing said life for her as a young girl on Ragged Island was good.

Of the expectations at the time, she said, “You had to learn to do everything. When you get up in the morning, you make up your bed, sweep the floor, you have to go to the well for water, and then you come home and get ready for school.”

Schooling for Pintard concluded at the age of 14.

Married five years later, the matriarch became the proud mother of 11 children, a full time job she said she had no desire to trade in for anything else.

Opportunities outside the home for females were limited in her day, with some young females upon leaving school became teachers referred to as monitors.

Some women participated in the salt industry, wherein Pintard’s father played an integral role in the export of Ragged Island salt to Canada.

Those who were homemakers engaged in activities such as straw work.

Homemakers who wished to make a few dollars would participate in government-sponsored cleanups of the settlement, which is perhaps considered a menial task by today’s standards, but was a beautification task that women of the day were proud to undertake.

Pintard recalled, “In my days, I had babies and I stayed home to mind the children,” affirming that though it was not easy to feed and clothe 11 children, education was important to her.

She stressed that she always wanted her daughters to “go for the skies”, and achieve even greater things than the women of her day.

Pintard is the niece of suffragist Eugenia Lockhart, who together with Dame Dr. Doris Johnson and Sir Henry Taylor, traveled to London in 1960 to make the case for a woman’s right to vote.

Her face, that gracefully bears the maturity of a life spanning two centuries, lit up as she recalled the feeling the first time she was able to exercise her right to vote as a woman in The Bahamas.

“Oh boy, that was great!”, Pintard exclaimed from her sofa as she patted her knee in an outward expression of her inner joy.

“That was good. Women? Oh boy, they used to put women to the backdoor of everything back then, so that was good, that was good.”

The matriarch, who has watched society both advance and regress from what used to be a stronger sense of community and family values, has fond words of encouragement for today’s young women.

“I tell them do the best and be good. I was a mother and a father and all to my children because my husband used to go to Cuba and Haiti and stay [for inter-island trade] and I really took good care of them. I always tell [young women] when I meet them to be good, don’t go out and do nothing foolish. Be nice women.”

Pintard left Ragged Island in the 1970s when her husband began work at the former BORCO facility in Freeport, where she became an active member of her church and a prized baker on Grand Bahama, making delights for her daughters’ entrepreneurial venture, Pintard’s Bakery.

When asked what she loves most about herself as a woman, she replied after a brief pause to consider the question, “I love that I trust in God and only him. My faith has helped me through life because I have been through a lot, but I have pulled through. It is only God.”

‘Put some value to your life’

Prieta Burnside, 70, is a child of the 1950s – an era that spawned political leaders and social trailblazers in The Bahamas.

It is no wonder then that the retired banker offered strong views to us about what she sees as a level of advancement of women in Bahamian politics today that in her estimation, misses the mark.

Burnside, who is Pintard’s oldest daughter, said, “I feel that women could have come a longer way than we presently are when you look at things like politics. When you look at the church, women have moved to a higher level than in mummy’s day when you would never have seen a woman priest.

“In my day, we had a few female politicians like Doris Johnson and others, but to me we are not progressing as fast as we should.

“When you look at Parliament, we outnumber men in The Bahamas and we have a lot of educated, smart women, but we have just one woman [Cabinet minister]. I think the men probably need to realize that we have women out there who I believe are better than some of those men, and we need to involve them because we are in the majority in this country.”

In a 2019 interview with Perspective, iconic Free National Movement (FNM) politician Dame Janet Bostwick pointed to the lack of a strong support system for some mothers, that leads to them foregoing aspirations of entering politics.

Acknowledging this dynamic, Burnside asserted, “I still believe, though, that where there is a will, there is a way.

“Eugenia Lockhart, my mother’s aunt, was a woman with a ton of children just like my mother’s mother, and she went to England and she spoke for the women. But yes, a woman with children would definitely need a support system.”

Over the years, value systems in The Bahamas have changed, and with it, prevailing ideas about what womanhood should mean.

Burnside said she wishes she knew earlier about the kind of pressures that upward mobility in one’s career places on all other aspects of one’s life, surmising that knowing then what she knows now, might have prompted her to do some things differently.

While by no means arguing against a woman’s career aspirations, she nonetheless noted, “Nowadays for the young women there is so much emphasis on career building that I think the mothering side and the homemaking side is almost hurting because jobs are demanding.

“What young women need to learn is that the family is very important, and you can’t sacrifice your family for your career, because that could be a dangerous thing.”

Her advice to young women today is to recognize their worth, and to act in accordance with that recognition.

She said, “I wish that more Bahamian women knew that each of them is important in God’s sight and to this country. I wish that each one of them would realize that they have a contribution to make, and that they would get serious about it and do whatever they can to make this country a better place.

“We need more committed women, who would also take family life and church life seriously, because we have too many young women who are out partying, and that’s what life is all about.

“Put some value to your life.”

‘Women need to support each other’

For veteran educator Afrika Karamo-Miller, 45, gender bias shows up in a very real way at the legislative level, being the daughter of an American father and Bahamian mother, who does not have the constitutional right as does a Bahamian married man, to automatically pass her citizenship onto her children.

Having been in the teaching profession for 20 years, Karamo-Miller is now a senior mistress in the public school system, and while she acknowledges the opportunities for women and men that exist in education in The Bahamas, she argues that inequalities persist.

Karamo-Miller explained, “Men are given an easier avenue for upward mobility, and even though you find that the women are far more educated, we are fighting for the scraps.

“You will find that in high leadership positions, you don’t have as many women and when women do get there, they have to go through so much to get to that point.”

As to the wider society, she asserts that, “Women are the fabric of the society and the force that really moves the society, but there still exists a bias toward women, especially in decision making at higher levels where women would still be moreso in the background.”

The educator’s more standout concerns as it pertains to gender biases, are centered on attitudes that diminish the viewpoints and personhood of females, and discount their experiences, particularly when it pertains to sexual violation or unwanted sexual advances.

She pointed out, “Even in terms of sexual violence, things have happened and you go to report it persons are saying ‘well, what did you do to cause it’? And by the time you talk to people and they undermine what you are saying, or make you think that you are overreacting, then you begin to second guess yourself and just start to say ‘okay, whatever’.”

For Karamo-Miller, the lesson she wished she learned earlier in life is the importance of speaking up for oneself as a female.

The previous National Teacher of the Year Award winner recalled, “When I was younger, I definitely wish I had opened my mouth and asserted myself.”

Proud of her life’s journey and her perseverance despite being seen as an “underdog”, Karamo-Miller is part of several organizations that promote the advancement of women.

“I would tell today’s women not to let anyone stop you or define you, or tell you that ‘this is the highest you can go’,” she insisted.

“I think religion has a lot to do with our view of women’s roles, and depending on the generation, you will have some people saying ‘I don’t feel men and women are equal’.

“The view of submission carries over from marriage into society and how people perceive roles of women.”

Regarding the responsibility women hold in facilitating their advancement, Karamo-Miller maintained that women must come together, support each other and collaborate as a key to empowerment.

She noted, “I have personal experiences coming into new situations where women try to pit one against the other, but I feel it is an obligation to support women.

“I believe we have to help one another up before we expect the other gender to take us seriously.

“We have to start with ourselves.”

You can ‘unlearn’ your biases

K’Shura Hanna, 17, is a 2020 high school graduate waiting to pursue university studies in Canada later this year.

Asked about her experiences of gender bias, she replied, “I absolutely have experienced gender bias. I think it most commonly comes from the profession that I wanted to pursue, because I wanted to go in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field originally because I wanted to be a doctor.”

The articulate and self-assured young woman now wants to be a software engineer.

The bias, she explained, would most often come in the form of “micro aggressions from people who would say things that aren’t blatantly sexist, but are very subtle like ‘oh, you want to do something like that?’, since things pertaining to science are generally dominated by men.”

Of her anticipation about her future prospects in The Bahamas, Hanna disclosed, “I’m not the most optimistic about my prospects. I would love to come back home and further my career, but I have noticed on a grand scale that is becoming a normalized thing, token diversity in high places.

“They will put a woman in a high position and they don’t necessarily want her there because of capabilities or her certifications; they just want her there to say ‘hey we put a woman in power and she is the representation of all women’.

“I don’t think forced diversity is diversity. Instead of a level playing field, they are just throwing one or two people in to satisfy that call for diversity.”

In the school setting, Hanna described instances where boys would be assigned the “more important” tasks in a class project, and the girls would be assigned the “more menial” tasks such as writing.

Hanna also cited experiences of school-aged males not always understanding that girls do have a say, which she attributed to household messaging which teaches that whatever a male says is absolute.

Meantime, she pointed to the disconcerting absence of female presenters at technology seminars she would attend, adding that when female presenters do exist, their “verbiage is directed moreso to the males”.

Like her older counterparts in our piece, Hanna urges Bahamian females to elevate their thinking.

She affirmed, “I wish they would see themselves as their own separate entities with self autonomy and I wish they would see themselves as simply people before they are a girl.

“I don’t think they were very comfortable with going outside what they’ve been taught or told. You can unlearn stuff, whether it is internalized misogyny, racism, colorism or texturism. You can take the time to become aware of the biases that you have, and you can say ‘this isn’t true, or this thought process is harmful’.

“You have a voice. Once you start at the ground level and once you start making other people around you understand that certain things aren’t okay, then I think that’s where the change comes.”

In her view, ideas about women’s liberation are subject to the same kinds of cultural resistances that liberalization of any marginalized group would encounter.

But Hanna is quick to point out what women’s liberation ought to be, versus what it is thought to be.

She opined, “The purpose of feminism on the whole is not necessarily to dictate to women, but for women to dictate what they want to do with their own lives.

“The purpose is not to say that to be a strong woman, you need to become an engineer, and not a teacher or a nurse. If a woman wants to grow up and be a housewife, that’s perfectly fine because that’s what she wants.

“If she wants to be a teacher or an engineer, doctor, plumber or mechanic, that’s perfectly fine because that’s what they want, and they are given the opportunities on an equal basis to do whatever they want to do.”

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