This goal of this study is to discern the ways in which women's subjectivities have changed through the processes of decolonisation, modernization, and nation building between the 1930s and 2000 in rural Dominica. The relationship between the shifting conditions of colonial and postcolonial life in its material, political, social, and cultural aspects, and the change in the discourses that relate to proper behaviour (moral discourses) are examined. I have explored the ways in which women position themselves with relation to these discourses (which could be called moral discourses), through how they employ them in their representations, and how they negotiate them, engaging them in the creation of what could be called an 'ethics of self.' The research, carried out over a one-year period in the village of La Plaine in Eastern Dominica, involved participant observation in the village; life history interviews with women of three generations; the analysis of skits and pageants; and documentary research involving primary and secondary sources. Several discursive themes emerged in the analyses: women's use of accounts of the past to critique the present, in what I have called critical nostalgia; the change in values epitomized by the notion of respect that formed the basis of local relations and which has begun to disappear with the change in governance and economic relations; the ambivalences involved in gender relations, especially those associated with expectations of women towards men and women's autonomy from men that derive from historical circumstances of colonization and decolonization; and the celebration and discursive dissemination of values that associate femininity with the political entity that Dominica has become. Differences found between women's expressions in both the discourses they engaged with, and in the particular ways they used them to frame their experiences, were related mainly to age and socio-historical changes, but also to socio-economic background.

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