Two constitutional conventions pass and women's legal status does not move

Madeleine Sylvain, Alice Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt had spent the occupation years raising money, organising and marching alongside the nationalists who wanted the Americans out. They knew Sténio Vincent personally. They had helped pay for the delegation that carried the case for Haitian sovereignty to Washington, and they had built the international standing of the men who made that case. When the occupation ended they expected the new legal order to record what women had done to earn it. It did not. The 1930s brought two constitutional conventions and a long run of chances to alter the legal position of Haitian women, and each one closed with nothing gained or with ground lost. In June 1935, a year after the last marines sailed, Vincent put a referendum to the country that extended his own term and let him succeed himself. His powers grew considerably. The constitutional standing of Haitian women stayed where the French code had left it.

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.

The Griot writers had built a politics out of racial authenticity, arguing that the assimilation of French values had impaired Haitian development, that African polities were communitarian while Haitian individualism was an import, and that only culturally authentic black Haitians could meet the needs of a black country. At the base of this lay a strong anti-liberal component, including an authoritarian and exclusive state, on the argument that liberal democracy in a country full of colour prejudice would divide black Haitians of different classes to the benefit of the mixed race elite. When Italy invaded Ethiopia the noiristes, like most other black intellectuals in the region, backed Haile Selassie and attacked Mussolini. The book uses this to mark the point at which the group's framework was fully outlined, before the war, and available for political use in the following decade.