The coffee harvest decides when Haitians can afford to marry

Coffee could not legally be sold in Haiti's small markets. The trade was tightly regulated by the government and the national processing companies, and growers sold into that system or not at all. The crop still set the rhythm of money for everyone. When the harvest was good, the rural markets had cash to spend on the goods they did not grow themselves, and that cash moved between the countryside and the towns on the calendar the agricultural seasons dictated. One of the things the surplus bought was weddings. Long unions were an ordinary part of women's lives in rural Haiti, and the moment at which one could be formalised, with the food, the clothes and the ceremony a wedding required, depended on how the coffee had done. So a marriage in a Haitian village carried a date and a price set by the world coffee market. The women who walked between the countryside and the towns carried the surplus in their bundles.

Eight months before the constitutional assembly, students in Port-au-Prince organised a week of protests against President Elie Lescot, who governed with United States support. They described themselves as continuing a fight for sovereignty begun in the nineteenth century, and they had been reading the Marxism, socialism and cultural nationalism circulating in Haiti after the occupation and the world war. The protests ended in a military overthrow of the president. Haitians called that week the Revolution of 1946. In August an assembly met to rewrite the terms of government and elected Dumarsais Estime. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale were part of January. Formed in 1935 by educated and financially comfortable women, the organisation brought its members and its students into the streets of the capital with everyone else, demanding representation in the state being rebuilt. Lescot had privately supported their claims. The nine months between his fall and the assembly produced a run of alliances for women activists, some genuine and some tactical.

After the ejection, the assembly stopped debating suffrage and began examining the women themselves. Representatives questioned whether women were politically sincere, intellectually capable, loyal to the nation and able to control themselves at a ballot box. Emile St. Lot, a noiriste who led the leftist Front Revolutionnaire Haitien, called the women bad mothers and dictators. A newspaper writer asked sarcastically whether women would now serve in the army, which ignored the women who had fought in the revolutionary armies of the nineteenth century and as cacos against the American occupation. The word feminisme was used in the chamber as an insult. Members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale then left the hall on their own, followed by jeering and by a military escort. When the assembly finished its work there were no women in it. Le Nouvelliste reported that the Ligue members had been assaulted. No paper mentioned the woman whose removal had started the whole thing.

On 9 August 1946 the National Constitutional Assembly in Port-au-Prince was debating whether women would have the vote. A section of the hall had been set aside for women, partitioned off from the rest of the audience, and in it sat members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, Haiti's first women's rights organisation, whose members came from elite and middle class families. A woman recorded only as a femme du peuple, a woman of the people, pushed through the crowd of politicians and onlookers toward that section. A soldier of the Garde d'Haiti stopped her at the threshold. The Ligue members protested and the crowd backed them, and she was escorted out of the building. Assemblyman Castel Demesmin, a noiriste, used the incident at once, telling the chamber that a woman of the people would always be rejected by these women, then urging his colleagues to save the revolution by saving the country from women. Her removal became the argument for denying the vote to every woman in Haiti.