[This is a post-print of an article published in Atlantic Studies/Global Currents 11, no. 4 (2014): 491-514. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2014.935638. Submitted for copyediting May 2014.]

Global child-saving, transatlantic maternalism, and the pathologization of Caribbean childhood, 1920s-1940s

Lara Putnam

ABSTRACT

In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no attention to child-rearing among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability. The shift resulted from the intersection of processes occurring on three different scales: global scientific and ideological developments, transimperial gendered professionalization, and local social and political struggles. This paper illuminates those multi-scalar dynamics by examining a specific subfield of empire, the British Caribbean.

As riots and general strikes in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and other colonies shook the imperial order in the late 1930s, metropolitan observers discovered the “native” family as the crucial incubator of proper working-class citizens. This article uses British Caribbean newspapers and unpublished Colonial Office correspondence generated by the 1938-39 West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission) to make visible the global and transatlantic dialogues that brought the “problem” of the Caribbean family to the forefront of policy debate. Although imperial rule would not last, the pathologization of Caribbean parenting would prove painfully persistent.

Keywords: Maternalism, British empire, British West Indies, Caribbean childhood, child-saving, Moyne Commission, West India Royal Commission

Introduction

The 1940s are recognized as a turning point in academic and policy interest in Caribbean childhood experience. The 1945 report of the West India Royal Commission (a fact-finding mission sent from England in the wake of colonial strikes and riots), the social welfare initiatives of the West Indies Development and Welfare Organization established in response, and major projects funded by the Colonial Social Science Research Council in the 1950s cumulatively articulated the “problem of the Caribbean family” as a defining regional challenge.[1] Loose conjugal ties and disorganized family structures—high-profile observers argued—handicapped personality development and hampered educational advance. The particular sufferings of British Caribbean children in this analysis were not merely the result of poverty, but rather crucial contributors to the region’s poverty and political inadequacy.[2]

It has seemed natural to understand this mid-twentieth-century pathologization of Caribbean childhood as part of a long tradition of white observers’ interest in black reproduction in the Atlantic world. Pursuing emancipation, missionaries paraded images of slave mothers; after emancipation, they made conjugal practice among freedpeople the index of moral advance (or degradation). As the nineteenth century ended, both the proponents and particulars of concern over Afro-Caribbean family practice shifted. New child-saving initiatives championed by local medical authorities (some white newcomers, some local men of color) and staffed by British nurses and local midwives under their supervision, reached out, more or less thoughtfully, to teach hygiene and infant-care to poor black mothers. The missionaries’ campaigns had focused on the moral, the doctors’ on the physical; in each case, they easily reinforced racial stereotypes, and thus shored up hierarchies even as they promised improvements.[3]

The mid-century focus on Caribbean childhood differed in important ways. First of all, attention centered on the social and social psychological consequences of child-rearing, rather than the moral or the medical. Secondly, different actors and alliances had pushed the issue forward: including, I will show, key leadership from race-conscious black activists and progressive international feminists. And therefore, the fact that the new wave of concern over Caribbean childhood ended up (once again) being fodder for stigmatization of race, class, and gender is particularly ironic. An alliance that sought explicitly to hew to universalist understandings of human development, and to place the interests of poor women and children at its core, proved highly vulnerable to the importation of old hierarchies and replication of old stereotypes.

How this happened is an interesting story in its own right, and also bears broad relevance. For the Caribbean shift did not happen in isolation. It depended on extraregional circuits of travel and expertise, imagery and discourse. Nor was it unique: similar shifts happened elsewhere, within the British empire and beyond. Looking with a microhistorical optic at the emergence of Caribbean parenting as policy concern can thus help us understand the systematic centrality of “family” in the mid-century shift from biological to cultural explanations for collective inequality.

We will find that the articulation of Caribbean parenting as problem reflected the interaction of local, region-wide, trans-Atlantic, and global processes. Key initiatives came not mainly from laboratories or legislatures but from civic activists worldwide. Child-saving spread through spiraling circuits. Scouting moved from Mafeking to Gilwell Park to Panama, lady doctors promoted women’s health from London to Pondicherry to Liverpool, child-slavery fears echoed from Hong Kong to Geneva to Kingston. Yet identical projects could have very different implications when championed from afar versus promoted from within.

By the late 1930s the spiraling of civic activists’ rhetoric and practices from metropoles to colonies and back had made child welfare a common language across multiple sites. This made possible both understandings and misunderstandings, temporary alliances and enduring wounds. Gendered struggles were crucial drivers of the process, as were racial ideologies, albeit in very different ways for colonial and metropolitan actors. Female reformers in Britain and the Caribbean alike used maternalist arguments to claim expertise and political voice. But the rhetoric resounded differently when uttered by Afro-Caribbean activists than when wielded by British "lady doctors" or "woman educators." Unacknowledged divides were integral to the transatlantic debates that brought the “problem” of the Caribbean family to the forefront of colonial policy in the final decades of imperial rule.

In this article I look in depth at the dialogues and debates surrounding the West India Royal Commission of 1938-39, as a window onto that process. A wave of violent strikes and riots rocked the British Caribbean colonies during the straitened years of the late 1930s. The WIRC sought testimony on the territories’ ills from local elites, colonial experts, social reformers, and political leaders. Even as they disagreed over fundamentals like political economy and constitutional reform, interviewees coincided in linking parental inadequacy—poor women’s willingness to bear children that poor men were unable to support—to the colonies’ poverty. The WIRC’s two female members assiduously sought information on the conditions of women and children. They received it from social reformers drawn from the rising black and coloured middle-class and professional stratum whose vision of race-proud self-help had long chastised lower-class sexual looseness and promoted moral education for black youth.[4] Thus the question of the lower-class family as social incubator entered into the WIRC’s deliberations and recommendations, and the “problem of the Negro family” assumed a central place in the agenda for “Welfare and Development” moving forward.

The new attention to child development was simultaneously progressive for its day and deeply regressive in its ability to shift attention away from land access, labor rights, and enfranchisement towards matters of individual character. If poor parenting was the root cause of poverty, perhaps the privileged need not give up their privilege after all?

Child-saving in the interwar Caribbean: scout troops, women’s pages, and black internationalist uplift

In a sense, colonial observers were just catching up. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, it was Afro-Caribbeans dedicated to “race consciousness”— convinced that “the Negro’s” moral worth and potential was equal to that of any people on earth—who wrote at length of the failings of Afro-descended mothers and fathers. Belief in educability was central to their anti-racist brief. “There is no superior race, nor yet any race forsooth,” insisted a typical letter to the editor: “The Negro’s backwardness is painfully due to his lack of opportunities” and “if given equal privileges and opportunities [the Negro] is second to none in all the arts and sciences of life.”[5]

This letter reaches us from a British West Indian-run paper in Limón, Costa Rica. The twin gospel of youth uplift and race-based solidarity rang out loudly in the West Indian immigrant communities of the Central American rimlands, where Jamaicans, Barbadians, and other islanders had been drawn by Panama Canal construction and banana expansion decades before. Circum-Caribbean migration spawned a literate, mobile, and savvy working class, sharply aware of contemporary developments among U.S. Afro-Americans and across empire. The Great War, too, saw tens of thousands of young men recruited in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Panama for service in the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) in Europe and North Africa, who carried new ideas back to their home islands or on to Panama, Cuba, and Harlem upon return. The voice of the emergent West Indian middle strata—race-conscious, internationally aware, proud colonial subjects but critically aware of the inequities of empire—is particularly easy to trace in these emigrant communities, home by 1930 to some 170,000 island-born sojourners and some 130,000 of their locally born children.[6]

On islands and rimlands alike, interwar reformers preached community and character-building to protect the next generation in a hostile and changing world. Their vision drew on multiple sources, British child-saving prominent among them. In late-nineteenth-century Great Britain, reformers had sought to rescue working-class children from poor home environments. Concern for child welfare and domestic hygiene inspired concrete programs, increasingly supported with municipal funds in addition to voluntary donations. Home visits for new mothers, midwife training, subsidized milk, and well baby prizes spread across municipalities in a burst of enthusiasm between 1900 and 1910; many of the new policies were codified by the Children’s Act of 1908.[7]

The imperial context was a crucial driver. The military debacle of the Boer War had fanned fears that Britain’s youth were degenerate or enervated, lacking the vigor empire needed. “The result,” suggests historian Anna Davin, “was a surge of concern about the bearing and rearing of children—the next generation of soldiers and workers—the Imperial race.”[8] It is no coincidence that Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell’s book, Scouting for Boys, published in 1908, attained extraordinary popularity in the British Isles, nor that “Boy Scout” (and later, Girl Guide) troops under Baden-Powell’s leadership burgeoned. As with the public health measures described above, youth recreation was understood simultaneously as a matter of racial prophylaxis and imperial strength. By 1909 more than 130,000 scouts belonged to troops in Great Britain and other troops were being founded rapidly across the empire.[9]

Caribbean reformers embraced the example of British child-saving even as they recognized that in empire’s reality, their children were last in line for saving. Crusading journalist and BWIR veteran Clennell Wickham informed his fellow Barbadians in 1919 that “statesmen in England” were “clamouring for better education of children so that the men of tomorrow may be better able to discharge their duty not only to themselves but to the state. Except in a comparatively small number of cases, children in England are no longer looked upon as a form of cheap labour but as a great national asset, as tender plants that need the utmost attention at the hands of the state gardener in the interest of future progress.”[10] The contrast between this tender cultivation and the colonial government’s approach to Barbadian youth made mockery of the claims to imperial unity. With bitter sarcasm Wickham summed up the colonial government’s message: “More prisons, harsher treatment and less education are the reforms we need, and in process of time Barbados will become the most ‘progressive’ country in the world.”[11]

If action would not come from without, reformers determined, it would come from within. Scouting boomed in the circum-Caribbean receiving societies, as returning soldiers of the BWIR merged British child-savers’ notions of civic training and physical revitalization with Marcus Garvey’s “Race first” approach to self-help. In the British colonies, early Scout and Guide leaders were almost always white elites or light-skinned bureaucrats. In contrast, rimland troop founders were middle-class or working-class black men, ex-soldiers or their peers, the troops as often sponsored by Garveyite UNIA chapters as Anglican churches.[12]

Scouting was one piece of a broader a focus on character-building that filled the rimlands’ black-run Anglophone press, all the more so as xenophobic hostility intensified there in the late 1920s and 1930s.[13] Internal critique seemed urgent. As one op-ed writer in Panama warned in 1927, “Ninety-nine per cent of the our rising youths are to be found drifting heedlessly, if not hopelessly, in the direction of life’s thundering cataract. […] Ignorance and cupidity hold sway among the vast majority, and the baneful stigma of undiminished race-prejudice continually operates to retard our progress.”[14] Extraordinary character was needed to overcome extraordinary prejudice. Would the youth be ready? It would depend on the parenting they received, another contributor underlined in 1927. “Are their parents or guardians, or they themselves, making the right choice between the development of the intellect and of character, on the one hand, of jobs and fine clothing and harmful pleasures, on the other hand?”[15]

Concern over the future of “our youth” often stressed young women’s sexual vulnerability. A typical letter in Limón’s black press warned in 1931, “Whilst mothers are scandalously gossiping with their neighbors, or otherwise employed; whilst fathers are indeed occupied enjoying drinks of stimulants in some filthy corner, then after exchanging a few hours of thoughtless ideas with their associates, whilst they spend profitless hours over some chess or draft board with boys, their interiors, their children are left to the mercy of ravenous wolves, that are ever ready to destroy them.” As they matured, children needed parental guidance all the more. “Are you really accepting that obligation, and performing it rightly, since you have taken upon yourself that burden of parenthood?”[16]

As with this article’s portrait of scandalous women and rum-drinking idlers, internal critique could run uncomfortably close to the canards of external racism. But for these child-savers-from-within, problems of black youth deportment were a summons to communal action rather than evidence of biological destiny. “The Negro race wants men of ability therefore we cannot afford to allow promising youths to join the confraternity of non desirables in their deadly march to a dishonourable grave,” insisted a 1930 letter. “How many a waif and a stray have been snatched from the scrap heap of humanity and manufactured into men of renown. Its never too late to try. Had the white race refused to reform their degenerates, their suns would have set long ago.”[17] While the condemnation of popular culture could reinforce class divides, in these papers the explicit message was collective responsibility. If black children were on the streets, using vile language and running wild, "Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs?” asked one scout leader in Colón, Panama. “Parents, for the major part, are the responsible agents”—but “then comes every individual who is not doing something in the interest of child welfare work.”[18]