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”.
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