The League builds a justice committee around one wage bill

The wage bill was the first thing the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale organised around, and the organisation took its shape from the campaign. Members called the bill the St. Aude Project, after the senator who sponsored the 1936 petition. It would let a married woman keep what she earned rather than hand it to the husband who held her in law as a minor. The League set up a Justice Committee whose assignment was that one piece of legislation. This tells you how the founders understood their own movement in its first years. They had a long list of grievances, from the vote to schooling to the criminalising of plasaj, and they built a standing body for one item on it. Money a woman could keep was the hinge. The structure of the organisation followed the campaign, and the committee outlasted the bill it had been created to pass.

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.

For the September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez chose a map for the cover, and the direction it pointed was north. The issue took readers on the trip many Haitians make once: a hundred and twenty miles from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the old capital, then several miles south to the village of Milot, then up the Bonnet a l'Eveque, a mountain of three thousand feet, to the fortress called the Citadelle Laferriere. Henry Christophe built it after independence against a French return that never came, and it is among the largest fortresses in the Americas. A feminist monthly was turning itself into a route. The league had been arguing since 1935 that women belonged inside the revolutionary story of the country. Printing a map and walking the readership up to Christophe's walls was a way of saying that the inheritance was theirs to hand out, and that they had decided who was going.

Comhaire-Sylvain published while her fieldwork was still running. The first piece to appear, Vocabulaire des croyances paysannes, listed the words rural Haitians used for the things they believed in. She laid it out in columns like a dictionary, setting each Haitian Kreyol term beside a word from Dahomey with a similar sound and a similar sense. Dahomey, in what is now Benin, was one of the coasts that supplied Saint-Domingue with captives through the eighteenth century, and the vocabulary had crossed with the people. Printing the comparison in parallel columns made the claim difficult to argue with, since a reader could run a finger down the page and see the correspondence for herself. The venue mattered as much as the method. This did not appear in a learned journal. It appeared in a feminist newspaper, in front of the women of the capital, at a moment when the capital was still being taught that its Kreyol was a corruption of French.