Martine Powers
Hazel Brown isn’t surprised when she meets people who have never heard of Elaine Manning. The few who recognise the name know her as the mother of former T&T prime minister Patrick Manning. But hardly anyone remembers that she was an esteemed politician in her own right, voted into local office in 1968, then reelected in 1971. “People were voting for Elaine, not for him,” Brown said, of Patrick Manning’s early career. “It must have been the influence of his mother who got him where he is.”
The histories of women like Elaine Manning are highlighted in a new book, made public last week, that gives a year-by-year recounting of all the women who have run for local political offices for the last seven decades. Women in Local Government Elections in Trinidad and Tobago 1946-2013 was penned by Brown, the outgoing co-ordinator of the Network of NGOs of T&T for the Advancement of Women, and edited by Dr Sheila Rampersad.
Brown and Rampersad discussed the highlights of the book at a presentation Wednesday at the Arima branch of Eastern Credit Union. They said their aim was to gather a comprehensive roster of the women who have played a role in politics since before the nation’s inception—long before T&T elected its first female prime minister in 2010.
“No longer can anyone claim that they didn’t know where to find information on women in the electoral process, or that the information was not available,” Rampersad said. “All writers, commentators, and radio talk show hosts should have this.”
The project has been in the works since 2006, when Brown tried to hunt down records of women involved in local elections and realised such archives did not exist. So she decided to create her own. But assembling a complete list was no small task, and required hunting down records from libraries, newspaper clips, political party archives, and personal interviews.
Brown refused to allow others to borrow her collection of notes from her desk, for fear that the archives would get lost or scattered and the little-known history would remain obscured forever. Some days, she wondered if the herculean effort would ever be completed. "Today is like one of those days when you see your grandchildren born,” Brown said.
At the outset of the project, Brown—herself mentioned in the book as an unsuccessful candidate in the 1987 election—estimated that there were probably about 100 women who had run for local office over the years. Instead, she tracked down about 500 names of women candidates—astonishing, she said, since so few of those names are widely known now.
In the process of hunting down the names of some of these women, Brown and her research assistants took out a full-page advertisement in a newspaper calling for those who knew of female candidates from previous decades to come forward. Almost immediately, the phone calls came flooding in. Brown was shocked.
“Some people called almost in tears,” Brown said. “One man said, ‘My mother was a local government councillor and she worked her [tail] off, and nobody ever remembered her after she left.’” The 2,000 printed copies of the book, paid for by the UN Women’s Fund for Gender Equality, will be provided to local libraries, political party archives, schools, and universities.
A slim tome at 82 pages, the book offers a roster of names, data, and statistics from each election but little by the way of personal anecdotes or private memories. Still, Brown said, through her research she learned about some of the behind-the-scenes challenges that faced women who dared to throw their hats in the ring: Many did not receive the kind of financial backing from political parties that was enjoyed by their male colleagues.
Some found that their candidacy applications were “misplaced” by local clerks again and again. And many women were discouraged from running for office in contentious districts and instead pressured to file their candidacy for electoral races where they had no chance of winning.
Rampersad expects that the research laid out in the book will prove useful to political scientists, pollsters, historians, and women’s studies researchers. Even more, she said, she hopes that it inspires other women to consider entering politics. “For women—those inclined to involve themselves in the electoral political process, and for those wishing to understand their own histories—this book is an absolutely necessary companion,” Rampersad said.
BOX
Facts about women in T&T local elections
* First woman elected to local government: Audrey Jeffers, elected to Port-of-Spain Council in 1936
* Total number of female candidates in 1946: 1 (of 156 total candidates)
* Total number of female candidates in 1999: 85 (of 275 total candidates)
* The first year that all 14 regions featured female candidates: 1992
* First woman mayor of T&T: Britomarte Beryl Hochoy, elected to represent Arima
* Success rate of female candidates in 2003: 53 per cent
Source: “Women in Local Government Elections in Trinidad and Tobago 1946-2013”