The 1932 constitution keeps the vote for men and the women wait

Haiti wrote a new constitution in 1932 while the American occupation was still winding down. The convention sat under elected president Sténio Vincent and included Pierre Hudicourt, Jean Price-Mars, Denis St Aude and Dumarsais Estimé. Haitian women had reason to think the moment might be theirs. Article 8 came out of the convention untouched: male citizens aged twenty one and over remained the only people entitled to vote. The legal scholar Mirlande Manigat explained the reasoning that prevailed, which was that the urgent business of the day was the balance between the branches of government and the end of the occupation, so the question of women could wait. The women waited actively. Through the occupation they had built relationships with Caribbean and African American women, including women in the Dominican Republic, which the Americans were also occupying. That partnership lasted through the winter of 1934 and no longer, since Dominican feminism was quickly absorbed into the anti Haitian doctrine Rafael Trujillo was promoting. Haitian feminists still say a Dominican woman helped shape their founding plans.

Herbert Hoover called Congress into special session on 15 April 1929 to deal with the agricultural depression that had run for a decade. He refused any revival of the McNary Haugen plan for dumping surpluses abroad, which Coolidge had twice vetoed, and demanded an institution with real authority and money instead. Congress obliged in sixty days. On 15 June he signed the Agricultural Marketing Act, creating a Federal Farm Board with capital of five hundred million dollars to build cooperatives among growers of cotton, wool and other commodities, backed by stabilization corporations that would buy surpluses the cooperatives could not absorb. Hoover told the board on 15 July that no industry had ever been given such resources by the American government. Prices then fell faster than the board could buy. It went out of existence in 1933 having lost some 371 million dollars trying to hold them up.

Haitian men avoided the main roads to escape the labour draft. Women could not, because they were the market sellers, the caregivers, the landowners, the shopkeepers and the domestic servants whose work required travel. American records and Marine photograph albums are full of pictures captioned as the typical country woman on a burro. Some men used that familiarity for cover. The Caco general Theophil toured the north recruiting while dressed as a market woman, travelling with a burro. General Petit Severe, wanted by the authorities in Cap-Haïtien, came and went from the town as he pleased in the same disguise, moving seven burro loads of rifles across the Dominican border. The performance made attacks on American officers possible. Visibility cut the other way as well, and girls and women travelled in groups for safety. Madame Benoît, wife of the Caco leader, went regularly to Mirebalais, Lascahobas and Port-au-Prince for supplies in the company of other market women, riding a bay mule and carrying a revolver under her dress.

The treaty signed at Port-au-Prince on 3 September 1932 would have replaced the Garde and financial articles of the 1915 treaty with two protocols on 31 December 1934: Protocol A completing Haitianization of the Garde and withdrawing the marines and scientific mission at that date or earlier, Protocol B substituting a fiscal representative for the financial adviser and general receiver, fully Haitianizing internal revenue and depositing government funds in the National Bank. Munro resigned as minister immediately after signing and expected ratification, since all the deputies had been elected as administration supporters in January 1932 and there was little public criticism of the terms. Vincent, however, made no effort to line up support, and when the text reached Congress some leaders decided to humiliate him by opposing it with a show of patriotic indignation. Nobody dared appear unpatriotic, and the joint session rejected it unanimously.