War and hunger push the league toward a politics of labour

The middle of the 1940s put three things in the same room in Haiti: a world war, the collapse of women's economic position, and a national politics unstable enough to be moved. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale used the combination. It set about building a programme that more women would recognise as a description of their own lives, and that meant three practical things. A clear statement of what the organisation held, carried through into what it actually did. More institutional weight. A working core of members who would take the load. The subject that came to the front of all this was work. Women's paid labour, women's underpaid labour, and the labour nobody paid for at all became both the league's political focus and the language it argued in. The feminism of the first decade had been built on rights and principles. The feminism of the second was built on what women did with their hands and their hours, and on what they were handed for it.

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.