The 32^nd Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture

 March 22, 2016

 Cities of Women:

 Gender Divides in Circum-Caribbean Migration, 1880-1930

 The Department of History and Archaeology will host the 32nd Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture which is to be held on Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at the Sir Phillip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, beginning at 5:30pm.

This year’s lecture is to be delivered by Lara Putnam, Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her lecture is titled, “Cities of Women: Gender Divides in Circum-Caribbean Migration, 1880-1930.”

From the 1880s to 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people left homes in the British Caribbean colonies to seek opportunity in economic boom sites in the Greater Caribbean: Panama, Costa Rica, Cuba, and soon outstripping all, New York.  Scholars have long noted that within this regional system women migrated as well as men, although in smaller numbers; what they have failed to underline is just how different women’s migration patterns were from men’s.  It was not a weak echo but a separate melody. Women’s migration carried them systematically towards larger cities and more modern infrastructure, while men’s migration in this era often did the opposite. The pattern reached its zenith in New York City, which by 1925 was home to more British Caribbean women and girls than any place in the world—including Kingston and Port of Spain.  The lecture attempts to establish some of the basic quantitative contours of gender-specific migration trends in the Greater Caribbean in the pre-World War II era.

The annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, first held at Mona in 1984, honours the memory of the distinguished West Indian Historian, Elsa Vesta Goveia (1925-1980). Born in British Guiana, Elsa Goveia took her PhD in History at University College, London. In 1950 she joined the Department of History, the University College of the West Indies, Mona as Lecturer in History, and in 1961 was promoted to the rank of Professor of West Indian History at the age of 36 years. With that promotion she became the first female Professor in the University of the West Indies, and at her death in 1980, was the longest serving West Indian Professor. Her major published works include the influential A Study of the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1957), and Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965).

The Elsa Goveia Memorial Lectures are regularly published and can be purchased in the office of the Department of History and Archaeology, The UWI, Mona Campus.

The Department of History and Archaeology

The University of the West Indies, Mona

Ph: 876-9271922/ email: history@wimona.edu.jm  website: www.mona.uwi.edu/history/

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