Before this paper no monthly image showed a Haitian woman thinking

Until La Voix des Femmes there was no regular publication in Haiti carrying images of Haitian women engaged in intellectual or political work. What Haitians saw of women in print came mostly from advertisements, and the faces in those advertisements belonged to white women and men from France and the United States, selling goods and with them an idea of a life lived somewhere else. A country whose population was overwhelmingly Black was shown its standard of beauty and competence as foreign and pale, month after month, on the same pages that carried its news. The League's paper put other pictures into circulation. Haitian women appeared in it as the writers of the articles and the subjects of the photographs, producing knowledge and doing politics. Changing what a reader sees on a page is a small intervention with a long reach, and the women who ran the paper understood exactly what they were replacing.

The book opens on the contradiction. New Year's Day carries great weight in a country born from a slave revolt, yet on this one the American flag flew over the central square in the capital, a visual reminder that the first sovereign nation in the Caribbean was still occupied. Vincent called the coming year the year of Haiti's second independence in his state of the nation address. The argument the book builds on this scene is that the end of the struggle for desoccupation was the beginning of a longer ideological and political conflict, one that ran through the revolution of 1946 and ended in 1957 with the Duvalier dictatorship. The same day is recorded in a photograph of Vincent, foreign minister Elie Lescot and the Garde d'Haiti high command celebrating together.

Haitian women entered the professions one door at a time. A ruling of 5 February 1920 let them into the pharmacy section of the school of medicine. The law faculty enrolled its first women students in 1929, and dental school admitted them in 1930. Among the hundred and ninety candidates who passed the baccalaureate in 1932 was one girl, Yolande Benedict, of the Institut Alfred-Viau, and her sitting the examination was itself treated as an event. In 1934 the faculty of medicine received women on equal terms. The first Haitian woman to finish the course and take the degree was Yvonne Sylvain, born in 1907, who had come to medicine at twenty eight after her mother's death and who had spent her twenties on sculpture, painting, art criticism, theatre and radio. She qualified in 1940, trained in the United States as a gynaecologist and obstetrician, and brought the cervical smear test to Haiti.

Sanders Johnson anchors the League's public arrival to a notice in Le Nouvelliste on 12 June 1934, in the same weeks that the urban papers were carrying arguments over indigénisme against liberalism. She reads the League into that debate rather than outside it, showing Price-Mars's criticism of elite men and women's material consumption and mutual vanity working on the founders, and Dantès Bellegarde's insistence that Haiti's cultural debt was to France rather than Africa pulling the other way. The League had no formal headquarters until the 1940s and met in members' homes, frequently Alice Garoute's. Sanders Johnson's larger point is that Haitian feminism was assembled inside an argument about what the nation was, which is why its members produced folklore studies, Creole dictionaries and rural fieldwork alongside petitions.