The league's politics were practised through the body

Haitian law and Haitian social practice in the 1940s left women a narrow road: disposable, confined, contained, with citizenship on paper and very little of it in effect. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale cut paths off that road. Jeanne Sylvain's letters show what the cutting looked like from inside. Physical health, mental health and the kin a woman could call on entered the political thinking directly, and shaped how these women read the moment they were living through. A woman down with fever, a woman unmarried, a woman running a household nobody counted, a woman who declined to continue: each of those was a political position as much as a circumstance. The league was steering toward sovereignty, personal and collective, and it understood where sovereignty is exercised. It is exercised by a particular body, in a particular street, on a particular morning, by someone who has had enough sleep or has not.

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.

Cléante Desgraves Valcin wrote up the inaugural session of the League's Saint-Marc branch, and the account appeared in the second issue of La Voix des Femmes that November. The newspaper itself had begun the previous month, edited by Madeleine Sylvain, Alice Garoute, Jeanne Perez and Valcin. Sanders Johnson treats the paper as the organisation's central instrument. It carried the League's general assembly reports, its conception of feminism, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's work on peasant belief vocabulary, her studies of the games of Port-au-Prince girls, and long stretches of foreign reporting that concentrated on Latin America rather than Europe. The mechanism she identifies is that a monthly newspaper let a small group of elite women build a national argument, recruit branches outside the capital, and enter regional debates on the strength of published research.