Breaking the Glass Ceiling
by Marcia Erskine
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Professor Elsa Leo-Rhynie is proud to be called a feminist and embraces her definition of the term: “a male or female person seeking to address oppressive societal gender inequalities and put them right”. Principal of the Mona Campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) from February 2006 to September 2007, Professor Leo-Rhynie was the first female principal of The UWI, a fitting cap to a 25-year tenure at the institution that spelled significant gains for women at all levels.
The ten years, 1982 up to 1992, when Elsa Leo-Rhynie was appointed UWI’s first Professor of Gender & Development Studies was an era of great activism for women in many of the academic and other centres of the world. UWI was no exception. Women activists were bent on changing traditional roles of women by promoting differences in perspectives, attitudes and values of both women’s and men’s lives in spheres as diverse as family life, religion, government, employment and education.
Fresh from a five-year sojourn (1987–1992) as the first female Executive Director of the private sector Institute of Management & Production, following service as Research Fellow and later, Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, UWI, Mona, Elsa Leo-Rhynie called on her enduring relationships across campuses at Mona, St. Augustine and Cave Hill, with women with whom she had been working since 1982 towards creating awareness of women and development issues in all three Campus countries and more specifically, on introducing women’s studies into the University curriculum.
She remembers well the group of University women, armed with data from the Women in the Caribbean Project led by Joycelin Massiah at the then Institute for Social and Economic Research at UWI, Cave Hill, questioning why certain women’s and men’s lives were being unfairly constricted and the possibilities for women in the University to change this. At Mona – Hermione McKenzie, Carolyn Cooper, Barbara Bailey, and Hilary Robertson-Hickling. At Cave Hill – Joycelin Massiah, Peggy Antrobus, Kathleen Drayton, and Maxine McLean and at St. Augustine – Rhoda Reddock, Pat Mohammed and Marjorie Thorpe.
In 1986, these and other women comprising the Women and Development Studies (WDS) groups invited distinguished Jamaican diplomat Ambassador Lucille Mathurin Mair to lead the project to introduce Women’s Studies at The University of the West Indies. With funding from the Ford Foundation and Netherlands government and a twinning relationship with the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague that afforded invaluable training for several members of the team, they set about the task of improving the status of women in Caribbean society through both academic and activist channels.
They were certainly not the first group of Caribbean women to have such a goal but were definitely among the first to plan and execute a specific large-scale programme within, and with the support of, the University. They mounted interdisciplinary and disciplinary seminars to build awareness and capacity among women and men, and worked with the UWI community to communicate the importance of gender and the extent to which it crossed interdisciplinary borders. They developed courses for credit, the first being “Introduction to Women’s Studies” and they also designed a research agenda for faculty and students.
Individual courses were developed and incorporated within disciplines such as “Sex, Gender & Society” in Social Sciences, and “Caribbean Women Writers” in the Faculty of Humanities. By 1992, with the concurrence of former Vice Chancellors A.Z. Preston and Sir Alister McIntyre, UWI took steps to institutionalize the programme of Women & Development Studies.
Elsa Leo-Rhynie took up the mantle of guiding the process of moving gender from the margins to the centre of academic discourse through the establishment of the Centre for Gender & Development Studies, as it was called. Though there was some reservation among the WDS groups that entry into the mainstream of academia at UWI would diminish their strong activist stance, reduce their independence and cause them to lose ground in their work with women, they provided invaluable support to the programme that was to affect changes for women, in the most democratic ways.
The Centre for Gender & Development Studies (CGDS) was not only for or about women, though some felt it should be. Elsa Leo-Rhynie, however, was determined that it not focus on women exclusively but that it address issues pertaining to both sexes and the relationships between women and men which resulted in discrimination and oppression.
