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Bastardy, Gender Hierarchy, and the State: The Politics of Family Law Reform in Antigua and Barbuda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Mindie Lazarus-Black
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Abstract

Law's saliency in the development of West Indian societies began in the earliest days of settlement and has remained critical and constitutive. The author examines the transformation of Caribbean law over time as an instrument of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.

Type
Family and the State in Antigua and Barbuda
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , 1992 , pp. 863 - 899
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

This article summarizes a portion of my dissertation. The field research, conducted in 1985–86 and for three months in 1987, was funded by a Fulbright Grant from the Institute of International Education and an Inter-American Foundation Fellowship. An American Fellowship for Dissertation Research from the American Association of University Women and the William Rainey Harper Fellowship from the University of Chicago provided financial assistance to complete the thesis.

A much shorter version was presented at the American Anthropological Association Meetings (Lazarus-Black 1989). I am grateful to the discussant, Sally Engle Merry, for her insightful suggestions for expanding the text. Later drafts benefited from readings by Lisa Douglass, Wendy Espeland, Kathy Hall, David Koester, Susan Lowes, Leonard Plotnicov, and Leslie Reagen. Raymond Smith, John Comaroff, and Bernard Cohn know well how this particular argument changed over time. I appreciated the opportunity to present the work to the Departments of Criminal Justice and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I have incorporated suggestions by anonymous reviewers for Law & Society Review. Finally, William N. Black listened with endless patience and responded with logic. Thank you all.

References

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