Two steel beasts sweat up the stony road to Saint-Marc

When Cleante Valcin wrote up the September 1935 drive to Saint-Marc for La Voix des Femmes, she wrote it as an epic. The road was brown and full of stones. The two cars were steel beasts, sweating and snorting and refusing to be turned back, pelted along the way by some invisible spirit amusing itself at their expense. Two young men friendly to the league, recorded only as Sylvain and Moise, did the driving with what she called skilful hands. The party reached Arcahaie quickly, parked there for a few minutes and pushed on north. The sea played hide and seek with them, disappearing and returning for five minutes, ten, fifteen, along the same stretch of road. Valcin loved that sea and said so. What she had actually done was travel one day up the coast to a meeting in a provincial town, and what she filed was a report with beasts in it, an unseen tormentor, and water with a will of its own.

At a rally in Trafalgar Square James, as chairman of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, declared that the Ethiopian crisis had produced a union of sentiment among black people in Africa, America, the West Indies and everywhere else, and that its cause was theirs to defend by every means available. Hogsbjerg shows the Haitian material feeding directly into the campaign. James argued that Toussaint had beaten European armies through a ruthless guerrilla war fought from the mountains and that the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 had been won in a comparable way, by scorched earth and retreat into high ground before falling on a cut-off Italian column. He urged an Ethiopian audience to destroy their country rather than hand it over. The committee even considered raising an international brigade in Britain.

In 1937, two years after the border treaty was signed, Haitians living on the Dominican side of the frontier were killed in large numbers. Jean Price Mars called it an abominable drama, a sinister episode and a terrible butchery, and read it as a challenge and a provocation to war. The official Dominican account described painful incidents among Haitian marauders who had been looting settlers. What puzzled Price Mars most was how readily the Haitian government accepted a settlement with the Trujillo administration, and he reported a conversation with a Dominican public figure suggesting that eminent Haitians had connived in it. The killing became a fixed point in Haitian popular memory and, for many Dominicans as well, a symbol of barbarism. It also fitted a policy. Trujillo was planting agricultural colonies along the border to make the zone Dominican, while Dominican migration law went on permitting Haitian labour in the sugar industry.

Madeleine Sylvain's father had campaigned for Haitian sovereignty and the country had followed him. Her own campaign for women's rights drew almost no attention, and where it was noticed people treated feminism as something shipped in from Europe or North America. One critic wrote that equality between the sexes was a chimera and would never become real. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale answered in print. In October 1935 it issued the first number of La Voix des Femmes, the first newspaper in Haiti run by women with a declared purpose of covering women's political and intellectual lives. By February 1936 the editors had found their footing. The paper carried political editorials, foreign affairs, and above all historical and sociological essays about women. Its ethnographic reporting was the unusual part. Roumain and Price-Mars had written about peasant life, but nobody had yet put the daily existence of peasant women in front of a national readership. Printing those lives beside the lives of city women made the shared parts visible.