Glenda Simms, Contributor
IN THE November 16 edition of The Gleaner, staff reporter Nagra Plunkett generated the eye catching headline 'Cops charge St. James granny for son's gun'.
A reading of the article made it clear that the police in the Area One division have decided to spearhead "a zero tolerance campaign against women who, they say, are protecting male relatives involved in criminal activities."
One is left to wonder if there were a time when the police were prepared to tolerate, ignore or protect such women.
And, if there were indeed such a time, what was the rationale for thinking that women who aid and enable criminals were less banal than the men who aid and protect persons involved in criminality.
According to Plunkett, the arrest of a 54-year-old grandmother who allegedly tried to not only cover up her son's evil deeds, but also involved her 10-year-old grandson in the deadly 'gun game' offered the defining moment in policing.
This is the moment that caused Assistant Commissioner Keith Gardener to declare, "I want to sensitise the baby mothers, mothers, and grandmothers that they will not enjoy sympathy from the police ..."
ACP Gardener has made the right decision.
HOLD WOMEN ACCOUNTABLE
Women who are involved in any kind of criminal activity must be held accountable for their actions. Their gender must not be used as a smokescreen to overlook their engagement in any kind of illegal activity.
The fact that the police have to make such statements regarding their resolve to hold mothers and grandmothers accountable is a testimony to the many historical, cultural and contemporary myth-making about the nature and potential of the female of the species.
Many of these popularised notions have, at different times in human development created womanhood to represent passivity, weakness, dependence, wickedness, deception, gold-digging and other unsavoury personality traits at one end of the definition syndrome.
At the other end, she is the virginal, loving, caring, nurturing cradle rocker who is supposed to rule the world.
Indeed, she has been rocking the cradle for so long she should be ready to rule every corner in her world.
NAÏVE FEMINISTS
Within this confusion about women's potential or lack thereof many gurus have articulated what a woman can do, what she should do and what she needs to do. Some of these gurus are represented by historians, theologians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists and a host of men and a few women who think they know the true essence of womanhood.
Amongst the few women who have used the feminist or womanist platform to spin theories about the true nature of women are those described by feminist Barbara Ehrenreich as "naïve feminists".
Using the occasion of the 2004 Commencement of Barnard, the celebrated Ivy League women's college, Ehrenreich informed a generation of bright, high achieving, privileged young women that many like herself have had illusions about women.
Hers was the generation of feminists who believed that when doors of opportunities were opened up to women, the nature of the institutions in which they found themselves would automatically change.
ABU GHRAIB PRISON
According to Ehrenreich this illusion was shattered by the photographs, circulated worldwide, depicting the atrocities carried out against Iraqi prisoners of war in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
The images of Specialist Sabrina Harman giving the thumbs up behind a pile of naked Iraqi men and that of Private Lynndie England 'dragging a naked Iraqi man on a leash' were the ones that shattered the naïve feminist notion that women socialised as child carers and nurturers are automatically wired to stay above the banality of the evil practices that men have honed, glamorised and valorised over centuries.
It is clear that the naïve notions of some feminists are part and parcel of the mentality that has dovetailed with patriarchal institutions that have turned a blind eye to much of the wickedness perpetuated by some women.
On the other hand, feminists who have come to grips with the impact of socialisation in the power paradigms of mainstream religious, economic, socio-cultural and political systems know that women are essential human beings and as such they are capable of reaching and surpassing the highest points of the human potential. They are also capable of sinking to the lowest points of the dehumanized psyche.
THE POWER OF WOMEN
It is against this understanding of the feminist/womanist world view that this writer welcomed the incisive analytical framework shared with her readers by writer Helene Cooper in the article entitled 'Waiting for their moment in the worst place on earth to be a woman'.
Ms Cooper is of Liberian origin and in her capacity as a journalist who writes about poverty and development she has been able to report in an authentic mode on the lives of the poor in a number of African countries.
She tells her readers that she had come to a point where she was convinced that in spite of the poverty and corruption in the majority of African countries, none seemed as bad off as her homeland, Liberia.
She changed her mind after she visited Bukavu in the Congo. In this town, she saw the faces of women who were old by the time they reached 35.
She saw young girls sitting in huts bathing babies, brothers and sisters in one rubber tub of water. She saw the real face of abject poverty and hopelessness.
Against this reality, Ms Cooper thought of Liberia where women experienced the kidnapping and drugging of their sons who were forced to fight in the wars waged by rebel factions.
She reminded herself of the hundreds of women whose husbands came home from brothels and infected them with HIV and of the others who had no choice but to give birth to the children of men who raped them.
Ms Cooper also knew that some of these women aided and abetted some of the atrocities perpetrated by their sons and husbands, but she learned that, in spite of these conditions, the women of Liberia ignored the taunts and threats of the young men of their village and turned out in record numbers "to make Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a 67-year-old grandmother, the first woman elected to lead an African country."
DESPITE UNCERTAINTY
Ms Cooper argues that the women of Liberia did this even though they are not sure what kind of president Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf will be.
This they did even with the knowledge that there are "plenty of African women who have brought us shame, from Winnie Mandela in South Africa to Janet Museveni in Uganda".
As she digested the impact of the election of a Liberian woman to manage an African nation, Ms Cooper reflected on one woman in Bukavu in the Congo.
She tells her readers that:
"I've been unable to get one image from Bukavu out of my mind. It is of an old woman, in her 30s. It was almost twilight when I saw her, walking up the hill out of the city as I drove in. She carried so many logs that her chest almost seemed to touch the ground, so stooped was her back ... Still, she trudged on, up the hill toward her home. Her husband was walking just in front of her. He carried nothing in his hands, nothing on his shoulders, nothing on his back. He kept looking back at her, telling her to hurry up."
TIME WILL COME
Ms Cooper concludes her article by saying that she wants to go back to Bukavu, to find this woman and tell her about what happened in Liberia and assure her that her time will come, too.
Like the women of Africa, the women of Jamaica know that women are not perfect, but they have a right to take their equal place in every society.
Some of them must go to jail for acts of criminality and the vast majority must be empowered to take charge of their communities and their nation.
ACP Gardener is a welcomed player in the process of demystifying the patriarchal definition of the feminine in our global struggle to find gender justice, peace, prosperity and security.
Dr. Glenda Simms is a gender expert and consultant.
