Four Sylvain sisters: a lawyer, a doctor, a social worker, a linguist

The League's crowded first years had one object, which was schooling. Sylvain put the demand plainly: Haitian feminists wanted above all the means to educate themselves, through high schools for girls, more primary schools, and a revision of what girls were taught. The leaders modelled the argument with their own records, and the organisation applauded academic achievement as a matter of routine. Madeleine Sylvain started at twenty-two by founding Pupilles des Saint-Antoine, an agency supplying basic needs to women and their children. She entered law school in 1930 and qualified in 1933. Her sister Yvonne became an obstetrician and gynaecologist, the first woman admitted to and graduated from the Haitian School of Medicine, in 1940; she specialised in venereal disease, worked through the yaws epidemic of the 1920s and 1930s, and came to treat women's living conditions as a public health emergency. Jeanne worked as a social worker and wrote to her sisters about exhaustion and impossible caseloads. Suzanne studied at the Sorbonne and researched at London University, comparing West African coastal languages with Haitian Kreyòl.

The American withdrawal in 1934 opened room for a wave of new associations, and on 3 March that year the Ligue feminine d'action sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince, the first feminist organisation in Haiti. Within days a nervous government forbade it to operate, judging its programme subversive and overambitious. Ten women sat on the steering committee. Madeleine Sylvain and Alice Garoute were the best known. Beside them were Fernande Bellegarde and Olga Gordon, Therese Hudicourt and Marie Corvington, Alice Teligny-Mathon and Esther Dartigue, Georgette Justin and Maud Turian. They redrafted the programme until it reduced to a single mild point, the physical, economic and social improvement of the Haitian woman, and got their permission. Branches followed at Port-de-Paix in February 1935, Saint-Marc in September 1935, Les Cayes in October 1936, Jacmel in 1937, then Petionville, Leogane, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The League ran evening classes for women workers in poor districts, a cooperative savings fund, libraries and a workers' centre, and petitioned for equal pay for equal work.

Mustafa Kemal allowed a second party, the Liberal party of Fethi Okyar, to be founded in 1930. It drew unexpected popular support and was dissolved in November of the same year, largely because the Republican party hierarchy convinced Kemal that religious reaction was coming. Travelling for three months afterwards, Kemal found that the discontent in the countryside came from economic stagnation and from party members taking the profitable positions for themselves. The failure of that experiment coincided with the world economic crisis of 1929, which struck Turkey through its agricultural exports, and with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe. A reform movement that had been aimed since 1839 against autocracy, and that had treated the western parliamentary order as its goal, turned instead to strong measures and quick results. The opposition went back to the countryside to wait, and waited until 1946.

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.