ABSTRACT
Bailey and Leo-Rhynie’s 2004 volume, Gender in the 21st Century: Caribbean Perspectives, Visions and Possibilities, incorporating most of the papers from the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) of the University of the West Indies (UWI)), and a number of other collections published by Caribbean-based scholars (e.g., Barriteau 2003b; Barrow 1998; Mohammed 2002b), are testimony to the growth and development of feminist scholarship in the Englishspeaking Caribbean. This chapter presents a brief historical overview of the Caribbean women’s movement in its early and later phases, the key issues and conceptual ideas which have emerged in feminist theorizing and scholarship, and the key questions currently facing scholars and activists within the region at the start of this century. Although the Caribbean women’s movement encompasses the entire region and working relationships exist across linguistic groupings to a limited extent, this chapter will focus on the English-speaking Caribbean,2 referring from time to time to other parts of the region.
