Papers by Kristen Childers
The American Historical Review, 2009
The History of the Family, 2009
This article examines the ways in which metropolitan French officials attempted to deal with the ... more This article examines the ways in which metropolitan French officials attempted to deal with the "population problem" in Martinique and Guadeloupe after they became overseas departments (DOMs) of France in 1946. Warning of a demographic crisis in the Antilles, French administrators targeted what they saw as a loose family structure and promoted European family values of Christian marriage and a stable nuclear family. The government justified smaller social subsidies to citizens of the new DOMs by citing the supposedly problematic nature of the Caribbean family and its difference from the French norm. In 1963 the government initiated a wave of emigration to the metropole through an agency called BUMIDOM which was to decrease birth rates in the Antilles and provide much-needed unskilled labor in France itself. Although the impact of emigration on the birthrate is unclear, one lasting legacy of this period was the acute sense of injustice many Antilleans felt at being treated unequally by the state. While birth rates have gone down in the DOMs it had little to do with the acceptance of European family models.
The Historical Journal, 2002
French Politics, Culture & Society, 2006
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Papers by Kristen Childers