Adelsia will be called Manze, Sor and Grann, and never Madame

Comhaire-Sylvain closed with a regret. Adelsia would grow old in Kenscoff and be called Manze Adelsia, then Sor Adelsia, then Grann Adelsia, and she would never be called Madame. The village titles were real and carried standing. Madame was the one the church and the state issued, and it went only to women married in a ceremony. Foreign reporters and ethnographers of the period were fixed on plasaj, which they produced again and again as their proof that Haiti had failed to become modern. Comhaire-Sylvain knew that argument and worked against it for thirty years. Her disappointment here shows how much of it she had taken in anyway. A woman who ran a trade, raised children and was known across a district was still, in the pages of a feminist newspaper, short of something, and what she was short of was a word on an envelope.

Three young men calling themselves Les Trois D had met since 1929 in a rented house in downtown Port-au-Prince to discuss what Price-Mars and the ethnological movement meant for the emerging black middle class. They were Lorimer Denis, a lawyer from Cap Haitien, Louis Diaquoi, a journalist from Gonaives who suggested the group's name before his death in 1932, and Francois Duvalier, then a medical student. After a failed attempt at a daily paper, the quarterly appeared with Duvalier, Denis and the poets Clement Magloire fils and Carl Brouard as directors, aiming to continue the work of La Revue Indigene. Duvalier and Denis wrote most of the articles, adopting the racial theories of Gobineau and Arthur Holly to argue that psychological and cultural characteristics differ sharply between European and African peoples and that Haitians are unconsciously governed by African heredity.

In February 1938 Jeanne Perez stepped down from the editorship of La Voix des Femmes, a year and a half after the paper had carried her open letter to the child Marie-Madeleine. She stayed inside the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and gave it her house. The building in Petionville became one of the league's schools, where girls brought up from the centre of Port-au-Prince were taught to read and write. She also had more time for the journal of poetry and creative writing she had started in 1937 and called La Semeuse, the woman who sows. The name matches the shape of the work. Perez was putting things in the ground in whatever medium came to hand, in a newspaper, in the theatre, in a poetry review and in the front rooms of her own house, with no assurance that any of it would come up.

The headline story of the March 1939 issue reported the Lima declaration in favour of women's rights, written after the Eighth International American Conference, and identified Peru as a leader in the field. Sylvain-Bouchereau then turned the comparison on her own government, recalling the solidarity of Pétion and Bolívar and the two countries' independence struggles, arguing that Haiti had been a pioneer in abolition and independence and that Peru had followed its example, and asking whether Haiti would now stay behind. She demanded to know whether the government would honour its signature in the Pan-American Union or persist in the politics of an ostrich recommending to others reforms it would not undertake. Sanders Johnson reads this as the League's core tactic: leverage the revolutionary past against the present government, and make regional embarrassment do domestic work.