Claudia Jones will name it superexploitation within ten years

The arrangement Valcin described in 1937 has a name. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born Communist and Black internationalist working in the United States, set it out in the following decade as superexploitation: race, class and sex compounding in the labour of Black working women, so that what they suffer exceeds the sum of its parts. Women writing in La Voix des Femmes were tracking the same structure at the same time from Port-au-Prince. Their position differed from hers. Jones wrote as an organiser of the exploited. The League's writers were arriving at the analysis from inside the contradiction, as women who theorised the exploitation of women and hired women at wages they themselves set. What survives in the paper is the navigation itself, the visible working out of whom they meant by women and what a cross-class alliance would cost the people proposing it.

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.

The constitutional assembly of 1946 was the third Haitian assembly to sit free of foreign intervention since the American occupation ended. Between 1915 and 1934 the United States had dissolved the national assembly, taken over the banking system, and rewritten the constitution of 1805, the revolutionary text that abolished slavery and declared Haitians Black and independent of France. When the Marines left, new political parties appeared, along with new organisations, new cultural and intellectual institutions, and a boom in literature and journalism. The historian Matthew Smith calls the twenty years after the occupation the moment of greatest political promise in Haitian history. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale grew out of that opening. Trained teachers and women of means came together in 1935 to build a movement for social improvement and to speak for Haitian women of every class. They spent a decade petitioning the government for the right to buy property, keep their own professional wages and vote in local and national elections, and they expected the energy of the 1946 revolution to reach them as well.

About a quarter of Haitian women were in marriages recognised by the state or the church. The rest lived under other arrangements, which meant the campaign to let a married woman control her own wages addressed a minority from the start. The justice committee of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale identified who stood to gain. It was the woman who earned her own living, sometimes kept children on that income, could not afford a divorce, and could not spend her salary as she chose because her husband held legal guardianship over it. Set out that way, the law was a real instrument of freedom for the women it covered. Its reach followed the shape of the class that drafted it. Haitian women's economic and political room to move ran through their work and their family networks, and the professional and educated women of the towns were the ones asking where the money a woman earned actually went. The other three quarters were living under rules the state had never written.