What’s in a name if My Mother Never Fathered Me?: A Response

By: Terry J. Peterson, LLM

In our Sociology class at the University of St. Maarten, students have an opportunity to investigate the integral connections between kinship, race, class and gender ideology and practice, and the state governance of families (Barrow and Reddock, pp. 335-449). This includes reviewing Caribbean parliamentary debates surrounding child welfare laws to demonstrate how our understanding of kinship influences lawmaking and ensures hegemony.

Students discover how Caribbean legislators miss the complexities of family and gender relations and issues of power and hierarchy. Dr. Nilda Arduin’s brilliant assessment of the proposed new law brings our study closer home. If mothers cannot participate in the renegotiation and reassignment of paternity, do mothers really father children?

Edith Clarke’s classic work My Mother Who Fathered Me (1957), has been a highly influential paradigm in the Caribbean among the clergy, children welfare policy workers, legislators and social workers for over 40 years. Clark derived her title from a line in George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin where he states, “…the man who had only fathered the idea of me left me the sole liability of my mother who really fathered me…” Basically, Clarke argued that because so many Caribbean children were raised and supported economically by their mothers in the absence of their fathers, they were in effect fathered by them.

However, turning to ethnographic data to analyze four kinship events that constitute and differentiate mothering and fathering behavior in Caribbean communities, Mindie Lazarus-Black in My Mother Never Fathered Me (1995), responded in sharp contrast to Clarke that women in the Caribbean have never and do not today father children because mothering and fathering are sociologically constructed gendered behavior and that norms for parental behavior do not crossover. In other words, women do not father children because gender hierarchy and kinship norms in Caribbean societies value and determine differently what men and women do, including how they raise children.

Black also claims that fathering in the Caribbean is accorded a special status that is marked by choices linked with specific kinship events that establish the alliance between a father and his kin. For example, waiting “til papa come” home for punishment and “going by papa for your money.” Black argues further that fathering is renegotiable; that men have choices and discretion about how much and when they will support or maintain their children. And even when it is legally mandated by the courts, it is portrayed as a gift of high value bestowed at their prerogative. Behavior associated with mothering, in contrast, is everyday natural activity that is unremarkable without much choice and non-negotiable. What mothers do for their children every day is not received or perceived as a gift; it comes naturally with the territory.

One clear distinction between mothering and fathering is the fact that paternity can be renegotiated and reassigned through acknowledgement and magistrate court as revealed in Dr. Nilda Arduin’s excellent analysis of Family Law in the Netherlands Antilles and the new draft Ordinance on Last Name Choice before parliament. The present laws allows a child born in the Netherlands Antilles to automatically acquire the surname of the father, notwithstanding that a High Court in The Hague decided 17 years ago that the present system is discriminatory and contravenes International Human Rights Conventions.

Should not fathers and mothers be treated equally where it concerns naming rights? In most cases the judge must determine that the man is the biological father of the child, but a child born within a marriage, or acknowledged by a man, will automatically carry the last name of the man. Thus, women can never father children in the sense of renegotiating maternity, as men can do about paternity.

Although Edith Clarke was an insightful ethnographer, anthropologist and sociologist, it appears that her assessment was made before these disciplines became gender aware. Her sense of what it meant to be mother or father derived from middle-class, colonial, and religious-influenced assumptions about Caribbean families and raising children. That nearly 50 years later Antillean lawmakers also cannot see gender hierarchy and the negotiation of power attests to the tenacity of the structural-functional paradigm and the hegemony of ideas about what constitutes “proper” families and “legitimate” children. Indeed, what’s in a name, if the draft law before parliament does not address such fundamental discrimination between men and women towards their children as raised by Dr. Arduin?

Our legislators must guard against using the structural-functional perspective as the sole theoretical paradigm when formulating Child Welfare Legislation, as it misses the complexities of class and gender ideology and practice. But certainly, the new draft law on naming rights will have serious repercussions on family life in the region.

Dr. Nilda Arduin,
President Foundation Focus, Producer of The Law in Focus