Crumbling macho society puts trust in the feminine touch
Published: March 25, 2006
THEY usually do not agree on anything relating to politics in the ghettos of Kingston, where backing the “wrong” candidate can bring fearsome consequences — such as a bullet to the brain.
But Portia Simpson-Miller, 51, who will be sworn in next week as the first woman Prime Minister of Jamaica, has prompted a rare dose of political unity with her pledge to succeed where decades of male leadership have failed in tackling the country’s notoriously high crime rate, joblessness and poverty.
The additional novelty of a woman being elected by her party to lead a society still weighed down in some areas by gender prejudice has also delighted many female supporters — just as her campaign anthem proclaimed: “It’s woman time now.”
“In the social mythology of Jamaica, it’s the man who was born to rule,” said Glenda Sims, a former director of the Government Bureau of Women’s Affairs and member of Mrs Simpson-Miller’s campaign team.
“People knew that men hadn’t served them as well as they would like and they decided, ‘Well, let’s tap into the other 52 per cent of the population’,” Dr Sims said. “There are people who say we shouldn’t focus on the fact that she’s a woman. Well, we are different and we see the world through different eyes.”
Some argue that it has been woman time in Jamaica for years, that women have long been household heads, community leaders and high achievers. They account for 70 per cent of university students and up to 90 per cent of law school students. They hold senior and middle-management positions, have started their own businesses and are stepping into formerly male-dominated professions such as engineering and computer programming.
But they have not yet broken into the highest echelons of business and industry, and there is only a handful of women politicians, making Mrs Simpson-Miller’s elevation all the more symbolic.
In Mountain View, one of Kingston’s inner-city breeding grounds for crime, gunfire used to be commonplace between supporters of Mrs Simpson-Miller’s People’s National Party (PNP), on one side of the main road, and backers of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), who occupy the opposite side.
While flare-ups here and in other ghetto communities continue, prompted by turf wars and gang disputes, the factions have at least found common ground in Mrs Simpson-Miller.
“The PNP like her, the JLP like her. On this we agree,” Michael Traill, a community leader in the JLP stronghold, said. “She gives us promises — schools, development, help for the children. She came from a poor background like ours.”
The Peace Management Initiative (PMI), a local volunteer group, sends envoys into the badlands to negotiate ceasefires by winning over the “dons” who call the shots — literally — and engage the community in more productive pursuits, such as cultivating vegetables.
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