The recog­ni­tion giv­en to the work of a num­ber of women who have been toil­ing in the vine­yard for many years, work­ing at the hu­man de­vel­op­ment of women and their com­mu­ni­ties, is of great sig­nif­i­cance and so for a num­ber of rea­sons. The first and per­haps most im­por­tant el­e­ment of the recog­ni­tion is that the work in com­mu­ni­ties and amongst women has been done. The his­tor­i­cal re­al­i­ty is that women have been among the most dis­ad­van­taged groups in Caribbean so­ci­ety while mak­ing great con­tri­bu­tions to fam­i­ly and so­cial life, ed­u­ca­tion, eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment, even in the se­vere busi­ness of the de­vel­op­ment of the po­lit­i­cal cul­ture and its or­gan­i­sa­tions.

The fact that a woman now sits in the high­est po­lit­i­cal of­fice of po­lit­i­cal leader and prime min­is­ter is tes­ti­mo­ny to that fact. But even more im­por­tant has been the work of tens of thou­sands of women in hold­ing their fam­i­lies to­geth­er, with grand­moth­ers, aunts, even the tra­di­tion­al "aun­ty" and "nen­nen" from next door fea­tur­ing in the bring­ing up of chil­dren. Award re­cip­i­ents such as Hazel Brown, Di­ana Ma­habir-Wy­att and Bren­da Goopeesingh, in their own right and rep­re­sen­ta­tive of dozens of women go­ing back over sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions, de­serve be­ing recog­nised for the work they have done to em­pow­er women to be­lieve in them­selves and to take charge of their lives and those of their chil­dren.

The sec­ond im­por­tant con­se­quence of the recog­ni­tion must be the mes­sage it sends to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that the Gov­ern­ment be­lieves that women and the work they do are im­por­tant for na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment. Too of­ten has that fact gone un­recog­nised. One clas­sic ex­am­ple of the non-recog­ni­tion, even in these sup­pos­ed­ly evolved times, is the fact that work in the house­hold, done main­ly by women, is not in­clud­ed in the na­tion­al sta­tis­tics. In iden­ti­fy­ing and award­ing women who have made their con­tri­bu­tion in the home-and sure­ly the mod­ern woman who is mak­ing a dou­ble con­tri­bu­tion through the work they do in the of­fice, farm and else­where-the so­ci­ety has an op­por­tu­ni­ty to make a quick­er tran­sit to a greater lev­el of con­scious­ness about the role of women in mod­ern so­ci­ety.

For the likes of the spe­cif­ic women men­tioned above, the award must be par­tic­u­lar­ly sat­is­fy­ing. This is so be­cause for decades these women and the caus­es they have stood for have not al­ways been pop­u­lar. In par­tic­u­lar Brown and Ma­habir-Wy­att have not been afraid to say pub­licly and loud­ly things which have not been pop­u­lar. In­deed they have been the butt of male-ori­ent­ed hu­mour, which has mocked their gen­der and their ca­pac­i­ty to lead in a mean­ing­ful man­ner. The so­ci­ety as a whole must salute them and be hap­py for them for hav­ing the courage (per­haps at times it re­quired not be­ing afraid) to take on phys­i­cal­ly op­po­nents by march­ing and hold­ing the plac­ards on the pick­et lines.

The work of He­len Bhag­wans­ingh, sep­a­rate and apart from be­ing part of a team to have de­vel­oped and now man­age a mas­sive and suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial or­gan­i­sa­tion, has been her gen­eros­i­ty to de­prived per­sons and com­mu­ni­ties. She has al­so fund­ed com­mu­ni­ty-ori­ent­ed health re­search. The for­mer first la­dy has qui­et­ly gone about the com­mu­ni­ty work she has been en­gaged in over many decades and it is good too that that work has been recog­nised. Out­side of that group of women recog­nised specif­i­cal­ly for their com­mu­ni­ty-ori­ent­ed work, women in pub­lic life such as re­tired judge, Gladys Gafoor, aca­d­e­m­ic so­ci­ol­o­gist, Su­san Craig, re­tired po­lice of­fi­cer, Mar­garet Samp­son-Brown, Ir­ma Si­mon­ette, cul­ture and ca­lyp­son­ian Denyse Plum­mer are all de­serv­ing. It is a sign of ma­tur­ing so­ci­ety by this spe­cial recog­ni­tion.