Orville Taylor | Women power

It is not Star Trek or some corny analogy, but the women have crossed another frontier yet to be celebrated by the deadlocked lawyer and the Chinese businessman.

From one single defensive error, by Deneisha Blackwood, the hybrid of Carl Brown and Pepe Goodison, we went down by a Bob Marley ‘one love,’ to a very good Colombian team. Never mind the cannabis versus coca jokes. Sensimilla is actually Colombian, and it is ‘Sin semilla’, which means seedless. So either way, ‘Las Cafeteras’ won. While the Reggae Boyz have kept us ‘waiting in vain’, let us love the women and treat them right.

For all the smoke, the performance in the Women’s World Cup, up to our exit last week, is our finest moment in our entire soccer history. What a fitting Emancipendence present. Thank you, Reggae Girlz.

And to top it off, the Sunshine Girls, losing by the tiny margin of three points, finished with one of the best goal differences and joint win-loss record. Imagine, beating home team New Zealand twice, as if they stole their black uniform from our flag.

And later on, this week, when our track and field queens start the journey of winning more medals than ever, in the World Athletics Championship, national pride will certainly be at a high as we celebrate women.

We saw lots of that last week also.

Every year, when the list of National Honours and Awards is published, there is always an ill-fitting pot, where the ingredients really don’t seem to belong in the same place. It is not unique to the current administration. Often, there are individuals who seem forced into the group of heroes and icons, with the only thing remarkable about them being that they have unstinting loyalty or connection to some interest groups or the political hierarchy. But that’s the nature of the democracy we have carved out. Thankfully, however, the majority of those who have been awarded do qualify even if it might have been for a lower category.

OVERDUE

Some of the recipients this year are, in fact, overdue. Usually, when a public servant traverses political administration and keeps her head above the water, sometimes irritating both sides of the political divide, it means that she has been doing well. I use the generic ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ because there are some things that we have taken for granted that were difficult to imagine years ago. For example, a conversation I had with a former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Labour suggested that on the whole, the crop of senior civil servants at the time, with the exception of Dr Jean Marshallek, did not have any female capable of leadership of a ministry, the one exception being then senior director Lorraine Robinson.

It Is very pleasing to see that the brains behind the Government’s PATH initiative, Collette Roberts Risden, has received her Commander of the Order of Distinction, joining some much lesser mortals, some of whom I am still incredulous as to why they have been so accorded.

Roberts Risden joins others like Carol Palmer, who has been a leader since her days at Merl Grove and though a rung behind Audrey Sewell, crosses over with O’Neil Grant, former president of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA), who led it through some difficult times. Indeed, Grant handed over to Techa Clarke Griffiths, whose substance was evident since she was an undergraduate sociology minor. Clarke Griffiths became the first female president of the JCSA in its 104-plus year history. Nothing about her ascendancy surprises me.

And we could have had more over the years. With the majority of our attorneys and judges being females, and having had a female chief justice, prime minister, and a long-serving director of public prosecutions, our gender watermark has been high.

HISTORIC

In the field of labour, these developments are historic. And female leaders in labour have a deeper history than Aggie Bernard allegedly only cooking for the principals of the 1938 struggles. Few know that Cynthia Hall was the first female vice-president of the National Workers Union, and importantly, was elected while a worker-delegate in the 1980s.

Novelette Grant was the first female chairman of the Police Officers Association, and had it not been for sheer hypocrisy on the part of the powers that be, she would have been the first female commissioner of police. Few remember, but Leonie Smythe Melhado, of blessed memory, was the first female chairman of the Special Constabulary Force Association.

Yet as my colleague Marva Phillips, former head of the Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Education Institute, often laments, women sometimes do not acknowledge what other women do or have done.

The head of our Jamaica Confederation of Trade Union (JCTU) is female, and the time is overripe for the stories of women trade unionists and foot soldiers to be told.

My challenge to the current leadership is to commission a publication including these unsung heroines.

But alas, I am not waiting for that, and I am publicly calling out the leaders of all the major trade unions and especially those under the JCTU umbrella. One of the first persons to welcome me into the field 40 years ago, Veronica Thompson, has been unacknowledged, while people who she guided and assisted in entering the movement have ODs and CDs. I bet this is an oversight.

Women power.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.