Haiti enters the war and plants rubber for the United States

The war began in Europe in September 1939, and Elie Lescot became president of Haiti in May 1941. He took the country into the war on the Allied side and then into a set of wartime undertakings that cost more than they returned. One was a placement scheme for Jews escaping Nazi Europe. The other was a programme to plant rubber and extract latex, started because the Axis had closed Allied access to the plantations of the Philippines and the United States needed a supply nearer home. Both ran on Haitian land and Haitian labour, and the economy came out of them worse than it went in. Haitian women's organisations had to operate inside all of this. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had spent the late 1930s assembling a case about schooling, child labour and the vote, and it now had to put that case to a government at war and to a president whose attention was fixed on Washington.

After the war colonial governments went into crop production themselves. State marketing boards in British West Africa fixed prices to prevent a repeat of the 1930s collapse, and substantial public money was made available for colonial development for the first time. African growers saw the arrangement clearly enough. They were paid a small share of what their crops fetched, and the surpluses piled up in good years went into large capital projects instead of back to the farmers who had produced them. Capital-intensive schemes favoured machinery and settler experts over African smallholders. The groundnut scheme in Tanganyika laid out plantations on North American prairie lines. The ground was too dry, the soil too thin, the machinery no match for the climate, and it cost British taxpayers millions. French investment in Niger River dams for cotton failed similarly, as farmers there grew sugar and rice for local sale. Officials also compelled farmers to dig erosion trenches, rotate crops and cull cattle. These measures politicised the countryside and handed nationalist leaders a constituency.

Comhaire-Sylvain set out in 1939 to find what girls in Port-au-Prince did with their free hours. The premise was that unaccounted time was a danger, that a girl whose day could not be reconstructed might be doing something that would cost her a reputation, and that such time therefore needed watching. The survey found something else. A large share of the girls she interviewed were servants in the houses of the well off, and they were working more than ninety eight hours a week. A small number were enrolled as full time pupils. Most were part time, and of those, many missed classes often. There was almost no free time left to investigate. The ninety eight hour week belonged to children who appeared on the rolls as students, and the houses that employed them were the houses of the women who would read the report.

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.