ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the colonial ideas in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Caribbean, arguing that they resonated with perceptions of the “failure” of emancipation that were expressed in the Caribbean colonies and the metropole in the post-slavery period. It examines the kind of institutional responses constructed in British Guiana. With its emphasis on training local “respectable” women as midwives and health visitors to educate “ignorant” non-white mothers, British Guiana’s infant welfare system demonstrates the influence of colonial ideas about race and gender on the nature of infant welfare work in the post-slavery British Caribbean, as well as the varied roles that men and women of different ethnic backgrounds and social classes played. But in showing the continuing presence of “traditional” midwives in this government-run system, the chapter suggests the ways in which colonial social welfare systems were never fully completed structures; the women most involved in their day-to-day operation ensured its accommodation to the realities of local life.
