[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s if already I didn’t know it, I recently had further proof that in Saint Lucia misogyny is alive and thriving! A delegation had come to the STAR offices perchance to undo what damage may have been done their organization by an article recently published in our newspaper. It struck me as odd that they wished to talk directly to our publisher, not the writer of the cited piece: me. It must’ve come as a surprise to the visitors, one of them female, when Rick Wayne insisted on my presence at the meeting.
At some point Rick asked why he, not I, had been approached about the matter at hand. No one seemed to have an appropriate response. Indeed the silence that followed my publisher’s query was, as they say, deafening. You could literally hear a pin drop!
What happened next, likely none of them expected. Rick proceeded to call out their blatant misogyny, perpetuated by, he said, the collective church. To everyone’s surprise he actually cited passages from Scripture that seemed to say women were as much property as their men’s other possessions. I looked hopefully across the table at the only other woman in the room. Her eyes seemed to be concentrated on her well-covered knees. But Rick was only getting warmed up. As if to make certain his question was understood, he proceeded to define misogyny: ‘Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women’.
The table remained mute. We returned to the subject that had led to our get-together in the first place, and agreed to disagree. There is more I might say about that particular episode—but that in due course. For now, one thing’s for certain: in Saint Lucia we remain a long, long way from gender equality!
