‘Standing in the Bigness of Who I Am’: Black Caribbean Women and the Paradoxes of Freedom

Abstract

The public discourse of integration and assimilation in the 1960s, when it was not about immigration or crime, was centrally about families, and the control of families, which is always about the control of women and children. In the 1960s the focus of concern was the childrearing practices of ethnic minority families, which were viewed as either too punitive (Caribbean) or too ‘traditional’ (Asian). These were reflected in the social services, with health and education being the key institutional sites within which ethnic minority women were rendered visible in both British society and the academic literature.