Inevitably, during my first conversation with someone new, they will at some point cautiously pose the question "Do you have an accent?" The rest of the conversation always transpires the same way. They ask me over and over again why on earth I would willingly trade life in a warm, magical place like Jamaica for Philly's muggy summers and frigid winters. They suggest that I must miss it, that I must be dying to return, and that I must look forward to trips home. I have given up trying to explain; my sisters from other parts of the developing world often get it but if you have never been a woman in Jamaica or a similar country, not even the most eloquent oration can communicate what the experience is like.

I'm not sure when I realized that gender inequality was a real problem in Jamaica. I guess it must have started when I was about 12 years old; two experiences stand etched in my memory as the first signs that something was amiss. First, there was my female Sunday school teacher, who made me nervous because somehow I knew that by her standards I was not neat enough, too fidgety, and had too many boisterous tendencies. One Sunday morning in the "Older Children" Sunday school class, she calmly explained to us that if women were raped while wearing skimpy clothing, it was their fault. My 12-year-old mind hadn't read any feminist literature, but I knew that uniformed high school girls trudging home in their calf-lengths skirts had been raped, so there were definite holes in her theory. Unsure how to respond to this I sat quietly, looking at the faces of my classmates wondering if I was really the only one thinking that this woman was a loon. Needless to say, my relationship with church was sticky thereafter, though that's a longer story for a different article.

The second instance was during "Guidance" class in fourth form (the equivalent of freshman year in high school) when the school's Guidance Counselor informed our class that girls needed to take the responsibility for putting the brakes on sexual situations because boys weren't capable of it. This time I spoke up, and asked if boys shouldn't bear equal responsibility. In fact, I asked, wasn't it possible that a girl might want to have sex and the boy might not? (Naturally the concept of homosexual sex was not even broached) My question elicited laughter from the boys in the class, and one particularly obnoxious boy (I'm not making this up, the yearbook referred to him as the most obnoxious boy in our school) asked if I'd been trying to have sex with someone who had turned me down. The Guidance Counselor went on to explain that boys have a certain "point of no return" mechanism and sometimes it just was not possible to stop. Once again, I left the class feeling like I'd walked out of the twilight zone.

I continued to be perplexed by gender norms in Jamaica for the duration of my life there, though I had no resources at my disposal to put my feelings and questions into context. I just knew that there had to be something wrong with popular music that urged women not to worry if the men in their lives were unfaithful, because as long as they were provided for financially it was all right. And that, someone, somewhere should have put the brakes on song lyrics like:

Gyal mi serious, mi haffi get yuh tonite
Haffi get yuh body even by gunpoint

Girl, I'm serious, I have to have you tonight
I have to have your body, even by gunpoint

But it was more than the music, it was the pervasiveness of the slut/stud dichotomy, and the fact that sexual harassment of women was a given in pretty much every sphere of society, and that girls who got pregnant in high school were expelled while boys who sired children did not. It was not until after I had arrived in the United States for college, and had gotten over the culture shock, that I was free to discover Bitch magazine, and Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf. And at last I felt free of the twilight zone.

In Jamaica in the early nineties, and even today, feminist role models and feminist literature are hard to come by. Whether she knows it or not, one of my older sisters was probably my first feminist role model. She was the first in my family to pursue a non-professional college degree (Sociology? What are you going to do with that?). She actually took women's studies classes at the local university, and let me have unfettered access to her books. None of them were about feminism specifically, but many contained strong female characters who had challenged the gender status quo. She also co-authored a research paper on gender bias in government-produced textbooks used in primary (public elementary) schools in Jamaica. I'm ashamed to say I never read it, though I was proud of her then, as I am now. Ironically, she later became the only person to ever explicitly urge me to curb my feminist tendencies. When I began exploring graduate school prospects in 2003, I excitedly told her about the Gender and Public Policy at George Washington University, thankful that I actually had a family member that would understand the value of such a program. She quickly responded that I should under no circumstances pursue gender studies. Why? Because Jamaican employers, even in the policy and non-profit sectors, don't like to hire people they perceive as feminists, and men don't want to marry women that are feminists. Finally armed with the tools to understand the scenario, I walked away from that conversation sad for my sister, rather than haunted by a twilight zone feeling.

You see, my sister did not mean to be oppressive or unkind; she was not urging me not to be a feminist, merely to not be perceived as one, for she knew the price that came with that. My sister is probably not perceived as a feminist very much in her own world, but she definitely comes across as strong and independent, and therefore somewhat of a threat. She is whip smart (did I mention she was published as an undergraduate?), she has a masters degree, her own house, her own car, is well advanced in her career given her age, and teaches part-time at the tertiary level. But she is single. This may not sound like an unusual situation for the average cosmopolitan American, but in Jamaica, where women are expected to tie their economic success to men, she is suspect.

Her comment about my graduate school choices reminded me of an earlier conversation, where she mused that she would need to marry a man who earned more money than her because otherwise, he would feel emasculated and they would fight all the time. When I suggested that the more rational solution to that problem might be to marry the sort of man that would not feel emasculated by a woman that earned more than him, she looked at me with genuine surprise and I realized that the thought that such a man existed had not occurred to her. She seemed to accept my explanation at the time, but I wonder if she truly believes it, or if the pressure of being a single, successful, childless woman in her thirties has gotten to her.

Another of my older sisters has two beautiful children that are my number one reason for going to Jamaica to visit. My nephew is five and as a baby was fussy, clingy, cautious, and afraid of everything. This situation was further exacerbated when his sister came along two and a half years later. She was his exact opposite; willful, inquisitive, unafraid and rambunctious, sometimes exhaustingly so. She stood in stark contrast to my sweet, sensitive, fearful nephew. I loved watching them both turn gender stereotypes on their head, but I wondered how long it would last.

Turns out it didn't last very long. On my last visit home, I was disturbed to hear them make constant reference to "boy toys" and "girl toys". So ingrained had this concept become to them that my nephew refused to take his sister's Dora the Explorer doll upstairs to be put away. In addition to introducing them to gender stereotypes before first grade, my sister pointed out as often as possible that my niece was "easily embarrassed"; naturally, this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Within the span of only a year, my quiet sweet sensitive nephew, has fully internalized the fact that he as a boy needs to be tougher, although he is still more likely than his sister to crawl onto your lap to cuddle. Meanwhile my loud, fearless niece has become more subdued, understands that the dolls and cradles and prams are her toys, and has stopped whining to play with my nephew's trucks.

While their personality shifts have definitely made them easier to baby-sit (you try baby-sitting when one kid won't leave your side and the other is intent on removing everything in every cupboard she can find), I mourn their loss. I mourn my sister's loss of the zeal that led her to challenge the gender roles being perpetuated by Jamaican textbooks. And I mourn the loss of every woman who will never have the chance to step out of her experience in Jamaica, and see it with a new set of eyes.