Not far from Panama City's Plaza Cinco de Mayo, across the street from the Seguro Social clinic, there's this old wooden church. These days, however, the building houses not a congregation but a museum, the Museo Afroantillano de Panama, or in its English version, the West Indian Museum of Panama. The current exhibition there is about West Indian women from the time that the Panama Railroad was built in the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century.

Panama's museums rarely allow photography within, and this one's no exception, so if you want to see the images on display, you will need to visit the museum. It will be worth your while.

A good part of this newspaper's readership traces ancestry through Panama to the English-speaking Antilles, but this exhibition contains several reminders that this mainstream is not all there is to Panama's West Indian heritage. We also have many families from the French-speaking islands, particularly from Martinique. Some of the photographs and paintings show the 19th century Martinican style of dress, fashions that have left their impact in today's Panama.

Fashion and needlework play an important part in the museum's presentation, because the fabrication and cleaning of clothing was the vocation of many West Indian women as well as one of the principal expressions of female culture. Shown are old photos of women washing clothing in streams, ironing at home and working in city laundries. There is an early 1930s photo of the Methodist Women's Sewing Circle. There are also examples of West Indian clothing and quilts on display, and the old-fashioned pre-electric irons that were heated on stovetops or on charcoal grills. The many women's portraits in the museum are interesting for a number of reasons, one of the most important of which is as a demonstration of yesteryears' fashions.

The raising and education of children was also considered "women's work," and thus this also plays prominently in the exhibition. Early in the 20th century the segregated Canal Zone schools for West Indian canal employees' kids used the Royal Readers as their textbooks, and examples of those are on display with other school materials. Many of the photos are of the old Silver Roll schools, from a 1905 shot of the public school in the long-submerged community of Culebra to a photo of the girls' volleyball team and the girls' softball squad at La Boca High in 1951 and 1952 respectively.

Special occasions like a 1913 wedding and mundane household scenes are portrayed, along with photos of women working as vendors, hat makers and teachers. The heavy labor that West Indian women did, like carrying water from public wells to their homes and collecting stones for construction, is also documented. The female role in health care, both as nurses at Canal Zone facilities and lining up with their children to be seen at the Cristobal Women's Club Clinic, is also shown.

This exhibition is about times before Panama's West Indian women had the vote. Women's suffrage came to Panama with Arnulfo Arias's 1941 constitution, which, however, stripped West Indians --- even those born in Panama of parents born in Panama --- of their citizenship and virtually all other rights. The progress of Panamanian women of Antillean descent to become university professors, doctors, lawyers, jurists, politicians and government ministers is a more recent phenomenon, and one that ought to be the subject of a future exhibition.

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