Bouchereau's 1957 study reads the position of women in Haiti as a sequence of cultural inheritances. It opens before the conquest, drawing on Las Casas, Oviedo and Charlevoix to describe a Taino order in which chieftaincies could pass through sisters and women held villages and whole cacicats — Anacaona, poet, queen and stateswoman, being the figure Haitian historiography has kept.

The second layer is African. Since the captives shipped from Senegal to Mozambique became the island's majority, she sketches women's roles in West and Central Africa before turning to the French colony, where the first women sent from France were drawn from prisons and the streets of Paris, and where women helped lead the 1722 revolt at Le Cap against the Compagnie des Indes.

The Haitian period begins in ruins. Slavery, she argues, had shattered clan and family organisation and made women objects of passing pleasure; Dessalines then had to legislate a social order largely out of metropolitan remnants.