EUGENIA CHARLES, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Dominica from 1980 to 1995, earned the nickname “Iron Lady of the Caribbean” for a variety of reasons: her uncompromising views on individual freedom and morality, her support for President Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 and her stout defence of preferential access to the European market for bananas from the Caribbean. Before she became the region’s first female prime minister, she was the first Dominican woman to practise as a lawyer.

Mary Eugenia Charles was born at Pointe Michel, Dominica, in 1919. Her father, John Baptiste Charles, was a self-made man who exerted a powerful influence over his daughter.

Between the years before the First World War and the Depression of the 1930s he acquired many estates in the island, became a successful fruit exporter and in 1940 founded the Dominica Cooperative Bank, a “penny bank” for the small saver. Eugenia was to inherit his business acumen, serving as a director of the bank until it ceased to have a separate existence, and engaging in several other successful ventures.

Eugenia Charles’s early education was at the Convent High School in Dominica and St Joseph’s Convent in Grenada, another of the Windward Islands, in the Eastern Caribbean. She then attended the University of Toronto, where she graduated in law, and the London School of Economics.

She was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in London in 1947, and three years later she opened a practice in both Barbados and Dominica. She set about establishing herself as a lawyer and businesswoman with formidable application, representing a number of overseas concerns in insurance and other fields.

One of her early business coups involved the construction of a much-needed modern hotel in Roseau, the capital of Dominica, which was built, with great taste, within the walls of an 18th-century British fortification, Fort Young. The venture was so successful that it returned a 25 per cent dividend to shareholders in the first four years of operations.

As Dominica, like the other islands of the eastern Caribbean, began to move towards independence from Britain, political life was dominated by the Dominica Labour Party (DLP), led by the Chief Minister, Edward LeBlanc.

The DLP represented the interests of small farmers, as opposed to the well-educated urban mulatto elite, known in Creole as the gwo bou, who controlled the economy from Roseau. Eugenia Charles, although not from a family of “awistokwa”, was closely identified with this conservative group.

After Dominica achieved internal self-government in 1967, and all British influence on the island’s affairs was removed, the LeBlanc Government brought in a Seditious Publications Bill, which would have given it the power to severely limit freedom of expression. This outraged the people of Roseau, who mounted a protest demonstration outside the parliament building. Eugenia Charles joined them, and her political career effectively began at that moment.

She became one of the founders of the Dominica Freedom Party, which won two seats in the 1970 general election, and she was made one of the appointed members of the legislature. In 1975 she was elected to the House of Assembly and became Leader of the Opposition.

But the DLP, now headed by Patrick John, still retained power, with 16 of the 21 seats in the assembly, and under him Dominica moved to independence. Eugenia Charles took part in the talks with the British Government, where she demanded extensive constitutional and financial safeguards.

She claimed that John was not to be trusted, but the constitution negotiated with Britain was largely in John’s image. In her speech at the independence ceremonies on November 3, 1978, she expressed at length her misgivings about the future of political freedom in Dominica.

Events were soon to prove her right. A BBC Panorama programme uncovered John’s connections with an attempt to overthrow the Government of Barbados by a convicted arms smuggler, whom he had appointed chairman of the Dominica Development Corporation. It also disclosed his plans to hand the entire north of Dominica to an international group with South African connections.