Blocked from the direct road, the League walks just off it

After the constitutional disappointments the women of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale kept asking for changes in the law and started looking for other ways to get them. The methods built during the occupation, public meetings, fundraising drives and the press, now went into navigating the bumpy road of the Vincent years. Madeleine Sylvain spoke to the Canadian press in 1937, when the League was two years into its programme of social service and political work, and said their progress was still hardly perceptible. She was right about the pace. Over the next two decades she and her allies worked at the problems they had named at the start: schooling for girls, the legal position of married women, wages, and the condition of women in prisons and asylums. Sylvain admitted the programme might look ambitious. The membership staked the organisation on women's intelligence, their labour and their capacity for friendship, and published its answer to the doubters: our fight is not a chimère.

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.