Women in Guyana are a cross-section of Asian, African, and indigenous backgrounds. British colonization and imperialism have contributed to the sexism against Guyanese women in the household, politics, and education.
Overview Guyana is geographically located in South America, but Guyana is culturally and historically aligned with the Commonwealth Caribbean and is often compared to Trinidad and Tobago.
Demographics A country with primarily Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, and Amerindian women, Guyana has also been home to women of European (mainly Portuguese) and Chinese descent. Indian emigration to the West-Indies is mostly concentrated in Guyana (43.5%).
Roles in Society Many urban Guyanese women are breadwinners and heads of the households, particularly in working-class families. In 1966, after Guyana's independence, women had to acquire stable jobs to accumulate a portion of the household income. As a result of the instability of Guyana's economy post-independence, it led to an increase in marriage and generational conflict.
Obeah women are folk-religious leaders.
The country has had a female president, Janet Jagan.
Research
Stereotypes and Household Dynamics Racialized differences between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese people have often defined female roles in the country's society.
Indo-Guyanese Women Early records about South Asian women (a large percentage from India) brought to Guyana for indentured, agricultural labor to bolster the British Empire's economy defined a "barbaric other" which sometimes blurred the identities of the empire's non-European subjects. Official colonial-era documents often led to the portrayal of "libidinous, immoral women" or female victims.
Afro-Guyanese Women Early studies of gender in the Caribbean defined households in terms of the "Euro-American nuclear family", and the assumption of female domesticity disregarded women's roles outside the family. Afro-Caribbean households headed by women were framed as "deviant, disintegrated, denuded, and incomplete", stereotyping households as run by a "strong, independent female and her obverse, the marginal Afro-Caribbean male" (in contrast to the Indo-Caribbean "submissive housewife").
In 1992 statistics, about "40% of Afro-Guyanese women live in a household with a male partner, as against 58% of the Indo-Guyanese women".
Research Results During the 1970s and 1980s, the Women in the Caribbean Project (WICP) surveyed women in the light of feminist research. In the 1990s, research shifted from creating visibility to a more "explanatory framework for gendered relations." A major drawback of the research is its almost-exclusive focus on low-income women, which has led to stereotyping and conclusions which fail to represent Caribbean women as a whole. Although some progress had been made towards women's rights by 2019, "only 24.5% of indicators needed to monitor the SDGs from a gender perspective are available"; this creates knowledge gaps in information critical to reaching gender-based goals.
History Female presence and demographics differ during the major periods of Guyana's history.The origin of Guyanese diversity is the European colonial creation of a "stratified, color-coded social class." Women's roles in a plantation society reflected their racial identity and their perception as "maintainers of culture".
Colonial Guiana At the onset of colonial settlement, very few women of European descent immigrated to what was then known as the Guianas; the plantation system drew women and men from Africa as enslaved labor. Very little accommodation was made for pregnant or nursing women in their work hours or punishment. The inevitable unions resulting from this gender disparity were viewed as perversions, although little was done to address rape or sexual violence against women (who were ever granted rights on a par with their colonial, white masters). This led to the racial stratification of society, with appearance-based terms such as mulatto, terceroes, and quadroon defining individuals. English women were seen as "refined and virtuous", a panacea for the colony's social ills.
Emancipation Free Afro-Guyanese and those who had been emancipated sought to avoid the plantation system by establishing their own villages, pooling their money to purchase land for agriculture. This village movement was seen as a threat to the sugar estates which still needed labor, and the colonial government enacted laws which prevented the purchase of land. Denied a means of subsistence, the Afro-Guyanese moved into the hinterlands as pork-knocker miners or to urban areas for employment.
Indenture The emancipated Afro-Guyanese sought identities other than plantation labor. Sugar estates filled their labor quotas with indentured servants from India and, to a lesser extent, China and Portugal. The first wave of indentured servants from India arrived in 1845.
Recruiters earned higher wages for contracting women, so deception and the "sexual exploitation of single women was not uncommon." Even though women came from an array of backgrounds, some religions or hierarchies made migration "easier than others." Women of lower castes were easy targets for recruitment, since the upper castes could afford to limit the mobility of their women as a means of protection. Caste practices and patriarchal rules were easily disrupted by economic hardship, leading to vulnerability; famines led to higher rates of indenture. The kala pani taboo was associated with impurity and correlated with criminal punishment.
"The regions of Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the Cauvery Valley in the South, were characterized by intense cultivation, high population density, and a rigid and stratified society"; labor was drawn from these areas to work in under-utilized areas of India and abroad. About 92 percent of the female workforce between 1876 and 1892 were from the regions of Bihar, the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, and almost 85 percent of the total female immigrants between 1908 and 1917 came from the United Provinces and Agra.
From the 1840s to the 1880s, most women who were recruited for plantations were single or travelling with children. Married women made up a smaller percentage, from 25.57 to 35.98 percent of the total female population emigrating from India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1886. The displacement from India to the colonies impacted gender norms when women entered the recruitment depot. According to Patricia Mohammed, "The men and women who chose to leave India entered into a different negotiation of gender relations than that which they would have experienced had they remained in India." The months-long journey from India to the Caribbean colonies fostered kinship (jahaji) between men and women which paralleled the Afro-Guyanese experience on slave ships, and rules about keeping the genders separated were not enforced. Travel to the West Indies was costly, and the high mortality rate of women during monsoon season led to the Indian Emigration Act VII of 1871, which dictated lower female quotas during those months. The rule was removed in 1879 after it was criticised for interfering with the "material comfort" of husbands, putting women's role as wives before labor. By the 1880s, it was seen as beneficial to encourage stability to prevent the social unrest seen as a symptom of gender imbalance, and the next five years saw an increase to an average of about 74 percent. From 1876 to 1892, female workers were 46.3 percent of the total.
According to colonial sources, Indian women were "subjugated widows fleeing a repressive, tradition-bound society for the free spaces on plantations abroad" or those engaging in "disloyal, immoral sexual behavior." Victorian English policy-makers sought to transport women who would be "good wives and mothers", encouraging the social harmony seen as essential for productive workers. Ordinance 16 of 1894 reduced the term of indenture from five to three years to attract families and women of higher caste. The introduction of Indian women had a polarizing effect on relations between the Afro- and Indo-Guyanese, by enabling the immediate creation of families at the expense of social intermixing. The gender imbalance also had consequences for women in relationships outside the male Indian-worker class. European and Indian intermingling was seen as a threat to the manhood of the workforce; coupled with the injustices inherent in the plantation system, "Most felt that they could do little to 'protect their women' against outsiders". Although the gender ratio seems to imply that women could choose their partners, it was "a choice that was often abrogated by control and violence." Since many unions were unrecognized, violence was a common means of controlling women. During the second half of the 19th century, 87 women were reported killed on estates; in many cases brutally "chopped" by agricultural implements. The murder of wives by husbands was often accompanied by suicide.
Crimes against women during this period were only examined when they caused social unrest (disturbed the plantation labor force), and claims by women were dismissed as resulting from their "loose morals." Pregnancy put women in a vulnerable position for breaking their work contracts, and legal provisions were often disregarded by plantation management. Women faced "a triple exploitation of class, ethnicity, and gender ... giving rise to tensions between competing, though unequal patriarchies - the hegemonizing white, the subordinated Indian, and sometimes, albeit very rarely, with the Afro-Caribbean sector."
Sugar production was labor-intensive; estate owners did little to develop technology to enhance output, putting the industry in a vulnerable position when faced with global competition. The Immigration Ordinance No. 18 of 1891 set a minimum wage for workers during a depression in the sugar industry, setting a lower wage for "non-able-bodied" workers (which often included women).
Unlike the Afro-Guyanese population, who primarily moved to urban areas when they were emancipated, the Indo-Guyanese maintained ties with agriculture after their indenture ended. By 1917, when the indenture system was abolished, nearly all Indo-Guyanese lived on (or worked for) the sugar estates; in 1939, women made up 31.49 percent of total Indian agricultural workers. They remained at the lowest skill level, however, and were rarely "drivers, overseers, or managers." Other domestic tasks, such as food preparation and childcare, were also expected. Formerly-indentured women's roles focused on the "household economy, namely in self-provisioning, peasant and surplus agricultural production and the formation of families." Women took supplementary jobs, such as shopkeepers or vendors of traditional Indian foods (still an important part of general Guyanese cuisine). Landholding, generally a legal right of women, typically was done by a spouse. The extended family (including children) was crucial to raising capital for land and pooling labor, with a "certain degree of power" granted to the male head of household. By the late 19th century, "control over the use and abuse of a woman's labor power was passed to the male authority." Informal patriarchal patterns took shape, with sons obtaining an education and daughters responsible for household tasks until a young marriage. The reconstruction of Hindu or Muslim values conflicted with those of Christian missionaries who sought to "civilize" the Guyanese population. An early resistance to education by the Indo-Guyanese was due to conflicting cultural values and the need for child labor, with increased resistance to educating daughters.