Women of Belize - Irma McClaurin

This engaging
ethnography is set in the remote district of Toledo in Belize, Central
America, where three women weave personal stories about the events in
their lives. Each describes her experiences of motherhood, marriage,
family illness, emigration, separation, work, or domestic violence that
led her to recognize gender inequality and then to do something about
it. All three challenge the culture of gender at home and in the larger
community.
Zola,
an East Indian woman without primary school education, invents her own
escape from a life of subordination by securing land, then marries the
man she's lived with since the age of fourteen--but on her terms. Once
she needed permission to buy a dress, now she advocates against domestic
violence. Evelyn, a thirty-nine-year old Creole woman, has raised eight
children virtually alone, yet she remains married ""out of habit.""
A
keen entrepreneur, she has run a restaurant, a store, and a sewing
business, and she now owns a mini-mart attached to her home. Rose, a
Garifuna woman, is a mother of two whose husband left when she would not
accept his extra-marital affairs. While she ekes out a survival in the
informal economy by making tamales, she gets spiritual comfort from her
religious beliefs, love of music, and two children.
The
voices of these ordinary Belizean women fill the pages of this book.
Irma McClaurin reveals the historical circumstances, cultural beliefs,
and institutional structures that have rendered women in Belize
politically and socially disenfranchised and economically dependent upon
men. She shows how some ordinary women, through their participation in
women's grassroots groups, have found the courage to change their lives.
Drawing upon her own experiences as a black woman in the United States,
and relying upon cross-cultural data about the Caribbean and Latin
America, she explains the specific way gender is constructed in Belize.