The Moving Word
Dr. Leslie James, in her exciting new publication The Moving Word explores the interdigitated sinews bringing together journalism, social revolution, cultural development and thought leadership through the promotion of Black political ideals in the lead-up to Independence movements across West Africa and the Caribbean, as the British Empire crumbled under the weight of a new nationalistic fervour sweeping both sides of the Atlantic. Moving Word is seminal in its contribution to the historiography of journalism by demonstrating the distinct power of the Press as a social institution and public good, with its transformative force particularly amplified in small island colonies still trying to navigate the disruptive but unceasing process of societal formation decades after political independence.
The precursor to that political decoupling from Britain was not accompanied by a radical departure from the social and economic features of plantation life. Colin Palmer argued that “Jamaica’s development has not been accompanied by a sharp psychological break with the long colonial past” and had “no dramatic structural transformation of the political, economic and social landscapes.” Rinaldo Walcott noted that Emancipation failed to “make a sharp and necessary break with the social relations that underpin slavery.” The next century represented perhaps the most consequential but least understood period in modern Jamaican history. Social dynamics remained relatively unchanged and the nature of employment and wage levels followed suit. Policy changes were not designed to enable meaningful transformation of the colonial state in Jamaica or any significant change in state-society relations.
It is this reality that James skillfully manoeuvres in Chapter Four of Moving Word through the intellectual, creative and feminist pursuits of three outstanding Jamaican women during the social fissures of the 1930s – Amy Bailey, Aimee Webster and Una Marson. The trio achieved eminence in their journalism careers and through their consistent advocacy drew necessary attention to the previously ignored connection between the colonial inheritances of Emancipation, and how these vestiges provided the catalyst for the latest iteration of resistance and upheaval. Bailey, Webster and Marson outlined how the remnants of slavery influenced outcomes in education, sexual health, women’s reproductive labour, racial prejudice, sexual violence, conjugal rights, illegitimacy and birth control. The two-decade interregnum bifurcating both World Wars represented a period of cultural and social awakening with the entrance of women into public life through civic organizations, the most popular of which was the Women’s Liberal Club (WLC).
These progressive developments were to raise the political consciousness of middle-class women like Bailey, Marson and Webster, but despite their own standing in the social order, their gendered and racial analysis was intertwined with the requisite acknowledgement of class divisions and their relationship with democracy and political agency. James demonstrates that their challenge to social norms represented a new kind of social agitation infused with the spirit of nationalism and a yearning for radical transformation instead of the piecemeal incrementalism that would characterize much of the preceding hundred years. James does justice to the legacies of these trail-blazing women with respect to the militance of their literary and journalistic insurgency. The dominant male voices at the time were unable to establish and articulate the relationship between the social cleavages in the post-Emancipation period and how these undergirded and provided the primary impetus for later labour disturbances.
Moving Word gives much food for thought by forcefully reminding us about the proximity of history; the importance of the intersectionality of race, class and gender; the persistence of the immutability of societal relations and the necessity of continually and diligently revising the “first draft of history” which journalism is said to represent.
Below is an excerpt from pages 133-147 of Dr. Leslie James’ new book The Moving Word, published by Harvard University Press. The excerpt is taken from Chapter 4 “Plotting Freedom”, is publish on this website with the permission from Dr. James and Harvard University Press
“The Work Has Begun”: Women Journalists and Emancipation in the British West Indies
It was therefore the history of slavery—and not solely labor consciousness or nationalist spirit—that informed Jamaica’s rebellion in 1938. This was visible not just from the demands of striking workers and protesting peasants but in the violence unleashed to quell them. Repeated reports detailed that the Special Constables deployed to deal with the disturbances were heard saying “shoot the brutes.” The Daily Gleaner characterized the people disturbing the peace as “diseased, pauperised, ill-housed, spoon-fed, superstition-ridden, undisciplined.” To these sentiments, Amy Bailey penned a vociferous and unequivocal denunciation. She first pointed out that those harboring these sentiments were not limited to the Special Constables who employed physical violence. They also appeared in the talk of those “in drawing rooms, on verandahs, in clubs.” Bailey located the supposed brutish traits of the insurgents in the system after the end of slavery. Their ancestors were thrown out on their own resources without land or money while slave owners were compensated. Bailey repeatedly made this point—which was rarely made by other journalists—in several of her newspaper articles. Once emancipated, those few who received an education did not have a proper one because the education system did not provide them with practical and necessary training in trades, domestic science, and agriculture. “[M]entally and economically they were still slaves.”
In addition to acknowledging the lack of compensation for enslaved people, Bailey applied this point to a careful analysis of Jamaica’s socioeconomic structure. Her attention to the speech of Special Constables meant that she was able to explain how attitudes rooted in the social dynamics of racialized slavery exposed the concrete and material exclusion and exploitation of Black workers after emancipation. Bailey listened to the repeated pleas from peasants for land or an end to land rent. She then amplified their demands by reminding readers that these demands stemmed directly from the lack of compensation given to their enslaved ancestors. There was very good reason for these land giveaway rumors.
Webster’s emphasis on the financial self-interest seared into the economy of enslaved labor also uncomfortably reminded readers of the continued exploitation of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers protesting on the streets. But no newspaper contributor connected the history of slavery with the contemporary socioeconomic conditions of Jamaica’s working classes more comprehensively than did Amy Bailey. As a lifelong educator, Bailey focused her energy on improving training to address the practical needs of the population. She argued that education had neglected agriculture, trades, and domestic sciences, and overstressed the academic in elementary and secondary schools. Why, she asked, “in a country that is almost purely agricultural” is there only one Farm School? But Bailey pushed further. She insisted that practical training should extend not only to trades and sciences, but to sexual health. The lack of education in these subjects, Bailey suggested, reflected labor and sexual relationships set up during plantation slavery.
Bailey’s willingness to publicly discuss sexual health and women’s reproductive labor in the press was unparalleled. However, Bailey articulated the ideas behind a larger movement around conjugal legal rights, with which she was directly involved. In July 1939 the WLC spearheaded the first mass marriage: a legal ceremony that wed many people in one go. In the 1940s these mass marriages became “spectacular public rites of citizenship and the Caribbean’s best-known ‘people-scheme,’” attended by prominent public officials, social welfare workers, and community members and covered in the press. In 1938 Bailey set out one of the guiding principles behind this movement when she tackled the topic of “illegitimate children.” She rooted the “problem” in three causes. First, the economic condition of most of the population meant that women served as house servants for free, and the “children follow” without any real incentive to marry rather than simply live together (thus defining them as “illegitimate”). Second, these conditions emerged from lack of education and especially sex education. And third, having children out of wedlock came from a mindset built during slavery, where the “illegitimate” children of masters were often afforded better conditions. “The roots of slavery strike deep and spread wide, and illegitimacy is one of such roots.”
Across several articles in 1938 Bailey also wove together the history of sexual violence against women and continuing racial prejudice. In her article denouncing the use of the term “brutes” to describe those participating in the revolts, she squarely addressed the history of sexual violence against women during slavery. She connected this to the color prejudice of skin tone on the island, which advantaged “those with the blood of their owners running through their veins,” whom she argued often received portions of land.
Illegitimacy and birth control, substandard education, color prejudice of skin tone, and the experience of women with dark skin: these were not typical topics of public conversation in polite society. When white Jamaican women concerned themselves with improving the lives of lower-class women, they were more concerned with morality than economic status. They certainly did not entwine class, color, and gender discrimination as Bailey’s intersectional reading did. To connect the legacy of slavery and the inadequacies of emancipation to race and sex prejudices in the present crossed the line of risking “racial feeling.” Indeed, Jamaican Garveyites criticized Bailey’s ideas about birth control as race defenders. In his regular New Negro Voice column, “As I See the Negro World,” J. A. G. Edwards asked Bailey whether she would not be happy to have “say, ten under nourished and physically underfed black brothers to defend your Ladyship when attacked by an intruder than not having any one at all?”
Bailey’s astute approach was to harness hushed topics like birth control and Black women’s experience into the passionate call for nationalist liberation from colonial rule, which was very much the topic of public conversation. That call among “thinking people” for national independence, she argued, must be built upon training and education of women as well as men. Women must “be able to let reason and not sentiment sway them when the time comes for voting for the right woman.” In this declaration, she takes as a given that women will be political leaders, even as she suggests that some women might be guided by sentiment—and emphasizes the importance of grounding the decisions of women voters in education and racial and sexual justice. By making Black working women the subjects of her writing, Bailey reconstituted who belonged in the national fabric. She rooted her understanding of freedom in the shackles that still held women down. To those who insisted that race prejudice did not exist, she conceded that they were “perhaps quite right; these pernicious evils do not exist. That is too mild and inactive a term. They live and move and have their being in this blessed isle.”
Bailey’s emphasis on the living, active impact of ideas is central to her strategy for the practice and realization of liberation. Her analysis consistently pressed emancipation on a social and economic level. Emancipation in 1838, she insisted, was “bodily freedom, but mental and economic bondage.” In her repeated return to the compensation that slave owners received, she emphasized that the problem was not merely that enslaved people were not financially compensated. The post-emancipation system perpetuated immense losses of cultural and existential self-worth, losses that were solidified by land and educational poverty. Aimee Webster’s subtle interjection into the Gleaner also identified the deep fissures in the abolitionist project of 1838. In her description of emancipation, she refused the dominant insistence upon “unity” and “new nationhood.” Rather, she argued that emancipation could not be achieved by skipping over a process of honest truth and reckoning. By taking up the centenary of emancipation in a year where nationalism and labor revolts were framed as the “new” forward thrust of Jamaican politics, these women insisted that real, concrete steps toward equal human freedom might be undertaken in a historically grounded reconciliation.
The work of women journalists shows how the historiographical archetype of the remarkable male leader, as Veronica Marie Gregg astutely argues, has “shrunk the space for an understanding of the matrix of relations, human and political,” at play in the core period of Jamaican and Caribbean nationalism. This focus on male leaders obscured the “bitter and protracted struggles” that constituted the definitions of Jamaican identity. As Keisha Blain emphasizes, the journalism of Marson and Bailey exemplified how women creatively used the press to build linkages of diasporic consciousness that were not inevitable but carefully constructed.
Yet women writers did more than just harness diasporic and international connections to contribute to the debates about Jamaican liberation. They carefully constructed these links around a history of emancipation unfinished. And they were unique in doing so among women journalists and indeed all journalists in Jamaica. Their articles candidly challenged the emancipation narrative of British benevolence pronounced by the government and the Daily Gleaner. More than this, they applied their historical mindedness to concrete suggestions for realizing social and economic freedom for Jamaica’s poor and disfranchised. By addressing the conditions of Black women in particular, these thinkers proposed more widely applicable terms of freedom than many of their male counterparts had.
Excerpted from The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960 by Leslie James, published by Harvard University Press
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Introduction by Keenan Falconer, book reviewer at Tenement Yaad Media. Keenan is an Economist by profession. He is also a writer and academic and has several published journal and newspaper articles, book reviews and short stories.