A decade of attrition runs up to the assembly attacks of 1946

The legislative record of the 1940s in Haiti shows women's rights argued over in the assembly, with grandstanding on every side of the question. The women who kept their own records were tracking something else across the same years. Misogynist speech did not thin out over the decade. It grew. Women's lives were handled as expendable. Care for women, in law, in medicine and in the ordinary running of a household, was largely absent, and it was women who documented all of this, about women, in letters and studies and the pages of their own paper. That documentation changes how the assembly attacks of 1946 read. Taken alone, the insults thrown at women in that chamber look like one bad session. Set against ten years of accumulated evidence, they are the loudest point in a campaign of attrition that had been running the whole time. The chamber only made the contempt audible.

On 30 December 1935 Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily, began running a series of articles setting out the racial and biological theories of the Griots. The Griots were young intellectuals who had taken the cultural nationalism of Jean Price-Mars, which asked Haitians to recognise the African content of their own culture, and pushed it into biology. In their hands African descent stopped being a heritage to be studied and became a set of inherited traits determining temperament, aptitude and the proper distribution of political power. Printing the argument in Le Nouvelliste moved it out of small literary reviews and into the reading of every educated household in Port-au-Prince. This was the intellectual equipment of noirisme, the doctrine that the Black majority had a right to the state and that the mulatto elite had held it by fraud since 1804. François Duvalier was one of the Griots. Twenty-two years later he was president.

Negotiations over the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had run on and off since the 1870s, interrupted for years at a stretch, with each side suspecting the other of stalling to gain ground. In 1935 President Rafael Trujillo and President Stenio Vincent signed a treaty that was supposed to settle the question. Jean Price Mars, who served as a Haitian diplomat in Santo Domingo and wrote the history of the two states, recorded that the hopes placed in it came to nothing. What the treaty did not touch was the movement of poor Haitians into Dominican territory to look for work, driven by population and by the sugar economy, and living once across the border in a disguised form of bonded service and under open racial prejudice. Price Mars called that the exposed nerve in all future relations between the two countries.

On 11 September 1936 Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published an essay on what they called the Haitian ethnie in Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily paper. Their claim was that biology determined the psychological and social behaviour of the different colour groups in Haiti. The country had been divided since independence between a largely light skinned elite and a Black majority, and that quarrel had always been fought in the language of politics, property and class. Denis and Duvalier moved it onto race as a physical fact, borrowing the vocabulary of European racial science and turning it against the elite that had used the same vocabulary to justify its own standing. The essay is the founding document of noirisme. It supplied the reasoning Duvalier used as president after 1957 to argue that power in Haiti belonged to Black Haitians by nature, and that opposition to him was opposition to the majority itself.