Gabrielle Ho­sein

It was the Girl Guides who rocked the In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day (IWD) march, held on March 8 in Ari­ma and or­gan­ised by Ida le Blanc and the Na­tion­al Union of Do­mes­tic Em­ploy­ees (Nude).

Un­der mid­day sun, these young women car­ried us for­ward on their songs. Caught up by their ca­ma­raderie, all I could see was them mak­ing the right steps to be­com­ing the faces of fu­ture Caribbean fem­i­nisms.

An ear­li­er gen­er­a­tion of com­mit­ted women's rights ad­vo­cates was there, women like Jacquie Burgess, Hazel Brown, Rho­da Red­dock, Fo­lade Mu­to­ta and oth­ers. Those younger than me, Mar­cus Kissoon of the Rape Cri­sis So­ci­ety, long-time re­pro­duc­tive rights ac­tivist Nicole Hen­drick­son, and UWI stu­dents Stephanie Leitch and Som­mer Hunte, were in the in­ter­gen­er­a­tional mix. Be­sides the women, there were men from the OW­TU, Shi­raz Khan rep­re­sent­ing Trinidad Uni­fied Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, and more.

We were con­tin­u­ing the path cut by women like Daisy Crick and El­ma Fran­cois, Thel­ma Williams, con­sid­ered the "moth­er" of the OW­TU, in­ter­na­tion­al so­cial­ist and pan-African­ist Clau­dia Jones, Christi­na Lewis, of the Caribbean Women's Na­tion­al As­sem­bly, who first start­ed In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day com­mem­o­ra­tions in Trinidad in 1958, and Clotil Wal­cott, founder of Nude.

These were women who knew that nei­ther they, nor we, could get weary un­til labour held the reins of pow­er, leg­is­lat­ed the rules and wages that cre­at­ed de­cent con­di­tions of em­ploy­ment, and trans­formed the kinds of in­jus­tice that af­fect­ed all work­ers and es­pe­cial­ly women, un­equal work­ers in their own homes, in oth­er peo­ple's homes and in the low­est-paid sec­tors of the econ­o­my.