The league concedes that the work will outlast everyone doing it

Jeanne Perez went on publishing La Voix des Femmes, and the paper stayed a place where women with different politics could set out what they thought and read what the others thought. The members were clear about the size of what they were up against. The arrangements that kept Haitian women without property, without the vote and without much protection were old, and were held in place by more than opinion, and the league accepted that none of it would be settled in their lifetimes. They worked on the terms that follow from that admission. The point was to set the scene for the girls coming after them, to give them room to run, or to move toward the light the way a brown and black butterfly does. In Haitian houses a mother telling stories at night asks a daughter: Ou libere? Are you free? The league was working so that a girl asked that question would be able to answer yes, mother, I am free.

Nation and nationalism sit awkwardly on postwar Africa. Territories had to turn themselves into nation-states out of administrative units in a very short time, and in some cases the work is still unfinished. Movements that called themselves nationalist were frequently defending a region or a group, as concerned with who would hold the territory after the Europeans left as with getting them out. Searching for a shared consciousness inside colonial boundaries usually misleads, because those boundaries were drawn for European convenience and carried no ethnic, linguistic or historical logic. In practice nationalism in Africa often meant sharper competition between ethnic, religious, regional and economic groups, some of those rivalries manufactured by colonial rule and some far older. Polities that had been dominant in the nineteenth century pursued their own aims inside the anti-colonial struggle and sometimes sought to leave it. The task facing postwar leaders was to gather political associations, trade unions, militant Christianity and Islam, negritude and pan-Africanism into something that could force a departure and then govern.

The Comite Executif Militaire that replaced Lescot had three members: Colonel Franck Lavaud of Jeremie, Major Antoine Levelt of the Artibonite, and Major Paul Magloire, who commanded the presidential guard. Lavaud and Levelt were mulatres, Magloire was noir. They dissolved the legislature Lescot had assembled and made Sylvio Cator, the Olympic long jumper and owner of the Cafe Savoy, mayor of Port-au-Prince. Crowds attacked elite shops, including the Bata store, and the committee offered power to the supreme court, which declined it. Parties appeared by the dozen. Strikes hit SHADA, Plantation Dauphin, the wharf and the HASCO sugar mill, where a former mathematics teacher named Daniel Fignole could move the working districts of the capital with a sentence. Fignole's party was the Mouvement Ouvriers Paysans, and its secretary general was a silent country doctor, Francois Duvalier, who had published political tracts a decade earlier under the name Abderrahman. Legislative elections on 12 May put communists into the Senate and defeated Fignole. The liberal constitution of 1932 was revived on 12 August and the presidential vote set for the 16th.

The constitutional commission of 1946 set aside the demands the Ligue feminine d'action sociale had put before it, on pretexts its president found false. On 16 July 1946 Alice Garoute answered in a public letter. She recorded the League's astonishment that the commissioners had so lightly brushed aside the ideals of justice and liberty of the revolution of 7 January, reminded them that Haiti had signed the accords of Lima and Chapultepec, the San Francisco agreements and the United Nations Charter, all of which hold that men and women are born and remain equal, and wrote that the verdict of inferiority pronounced against women since 1804 disgusted and revolted her. She ended with a line that reads as a manifesto: we will no longer resign ourselves to being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. Garoute was born in 1874, daughter of Pauline Brice, and had grown up among exiles arguing politics in Kingston.