Haitian feminists refuse to choose between class and race

Through the 1940s, with a world war running, the killing of Haitians on the Dominican border still fresh, and new international bodies such as the United Nations being assembled, the women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale kept coming back to enslavement as their term of analysis. They used it for three specific exposures: the vulnerability of Black women to sexual violence, in the past and in the present; unions in which the woman held no equal standing; and work that was underpaid or not paid at all. Marxist writers of the same years were drawing a similar line from unpaid labour to enslavement on a world scale, and the Haitian women drew it too. They were also, at the same time, thoroughly committed to taking part in capitalism, to earning, holding property and building institutions. The combination reads as contradiction only from outside. They were describing a position no existing theory had been built for, and they declined to trim the account to fit either one.

The constitutional commission of 1946 set aside the demands the Ligue feminine d'action sociale had put before it, on pretexts its president found false. On 16 July 1946 Alice Garoute answered in a public letter. She recorded the League's astonishment that the commissioners had so lightly brushed aside the ideals of justice and liberty of the revolution of 7 January, reminded them that Haiti had signed the accords of Lima and Chapultepec, the San Francisco agreements and the United Nations Charter, all of which hold that men and women are born and remain equal, and wrote that the verdict of inferiority pronounced against women since 1804 disgusted and revolted her. She ended with a line that reads as a manifesto: we will no longer resign ourselves to being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. Garoute was born in 1874, daughter of Pauline Brice, and had grown up among exiles arguing politics in Kingston.

The Griot writers had built a politics out of racial authenticity, arguing that the assimilation of French values had impaired Haitian development, that African polities were communitarian while Haitian individualism was an import, and that only culturally authentic black Haitians could meet the needs of a black country. At the base of this lay a strong anti-liberal component, including an authoritarian and exclusive state, on the argument that liberal democracy in a country full of colour prejudice would divide black Haitians of different classes to the benefit of the mixed race elite. When Italy invaded Ethiopia the noiristes, like most other black intellectuals in the region, backed Haile Selassie and attacked Mussolini. The book uses this to mark the point at which the group's framework was fully outlined, before the war, and available for political use in the following decade.

Radio arrived with the marines in 1926, as jazz had, and the first commercial station followed in the middle of the decade. By 1948 seven stations operated in Port-au-Prince. In its early phase radio spread ideas through music and discussion, with Dantes Bellegarde and Felix Magloire debating weekly on the air. Wartime import shortages cut the supply of French and American records just as demand rose, so entertainment stations expanded in-studio concerts by groups such as Jazz des Jeunes, which were very popular because the country had no developed recording industry. The book argues that this infrastructure is what carried black consciousness out of the drawing rooms of the black intelligentsia to the popular classes, and that in the following decade radio would bring Haitians closer to international events and give political figures a route to the illiterate majority.