UWI Crest Campus Image: Mona Curve image for menu aesthetics
 
Mona Academic Conference
Search |
About | General Information | Programme | Profiles | Abstracts: Day2      Day 3 | News Releases | Home
 
 
red colored bar
grey colored bar
Abstracts for
August 30 , 2003
Feminist Scholarship and Society.....
Feminism, Activism and Society
Gender, History Education .....
Gender Dimensions & Social Capital...
Shake that Booty in Jesus Name...
Issues of Gender Equity and Livelihood.....
Masculinity, the Political Economy of the Body....

Men and Women in Love:
A changing Conjugality...

'Mama, Is That You?: Erotic Disguise.....

Caribbean Masculinities and Femininities:.....
The Male Marginalisation Thesis Revisited.....
Challenging Gender Privileging: A Caribbean..
Shifting, Dismantling, Erecting.....
Women and Work: Policy Implications .....
The Environment: Prospects .....
Female Emancipation and the Sewing Machine
Men and Women in Love, Marriage and Divorce:
A Changing Conjugality in Barbados?

by Christine Barrow

 

Caribbean matrifocal family research contrasts the close and enduring bond between mother and child with the weak, brittle and unstable dynamics of conjugal relations. This, despite the campaigns of the Church and other moral authorities to promote the marriage-plus-nuclear-family ideal of monogamous love (absolute, exclusive and for ever), patriarchal authority, wifely “respectability”, and conjugal co-residence and stability. If anything, recent social and legal changes appear to be undermining their mission even further.

In Barbados, for example, young women in contrast to their mothers and grandmothers, experience significant occupational and social mobility along with personal autonomy. Furthermore, divorce is now based on the sole grounds of “irretrievable breakdown”. It is socially acceptable, and the rates have escalated.

But marriage rates have also increased in recent years and there is evidence that the younger generation of newly-weds are restructuring conjugality by factoring in romance, fidelity and equality. It appears that it is modern wives who are negotiating for change, while their men-folk continue to define love, sex and infidelity differently, to resist intimacy, to claim control, and to cling tenaciously to their space “outside”.

 

 
     
red colored bar
grey colored bar
Contact Us
© The University of the West Indies. All rights reserved. Disclaimer | Privacy Statement
Telephone: (876) 927-0641 Fax: (876) 927-1913/2494/2964
Site best viewed at 800 x 600 resolution on Internet Explorer.