There is considerable variability among Caribbean states, with the proportion of all households headed by single females ranging from 1.8 per cent in Cuba to 28.9 per cent in St Vincent and the Grenadines (United Nations 1989). But within the mixture of prevailing forms, one significant strand involves mothers and female kin assuming the most important link within household and family (Olwig 1993:153). Describing the situation with reference to Monserrat, for example, Pulsipher suggests that:
The term family means kin connected to you through the female line. Long-term relationships are reserved for maternal consanguineal kin; and males, rather than being disfunctional [sic] in the family or marginalised, as some have suggested, play out their roles most often in their mother/son and sister/brother and uncle relationships.
(Pulsipher 1993:61)
In Barbados it is common for women to have children early, but for marriage to be delayed, sometimes after several ‘child-bearing sexual unions’ (Olwig 1993:153; Besson 1993:21). Thus the link between procreation, joint parenting and, in some cases, household formation is loose. The houseyard, a typical (though now declining) residential form whose roots are traceable to the domestic space of the slave system, reflects and facilitates this type of parenting. In so far as it still persists, it offers accommodation to the rising educational and career aspirations of young West Indian women, facilitating care of their children by their mothers or other female relatives and thus allowing young women to combine child-bearing with being students and workers, even in the capacity of temporary migrants (Pulsipher 1993:61).