Market women measure by pot, by hand and by smell

Comhaire-Sylvain did not raise Adelsia's arithmetic as a compliment to one woman. She raised it as a question about how women count, in both senses of the phrase. Vendors and market women measured with pots of graded sizes, by the weight of a handful, by touch and by smell, and they did it accurately enough to run a trade on it for a lifetime. That is a system of measurement. It has units, it can be taught to a daughter, and a buyer can check it. It had never been written down because the people who wrote things down did not think of it as knowledge. In La Voix des Femmes she argued that these systems mattered and that the women using them counted as members of the nation. The pot a woman used to measure rice was an instrument, and no laboratory recognising it changed nothing about what it could do.

Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was a former French colonial town carrying far more people than it had been laid out to hold. The physical crowding was one problem. The rules about where a woman could go, what she could do and who she was permitted to be were the other, and they were tighter. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had made a house for women, the Foyer, and it helped. It did not alter the city. So women took their freedom wherever an opening appeared. For some the opening was the Foyer, a room where they were expected and where being there required no explanation. For others the sea was more spacious. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the two side by side in a single sentence and leaves them standing there together: a feminist classroom and the water off the harbour, listed as the places that offered what the streets withheld. The list is short because the list was short.

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.