What worried the state was how freely Haitian women moved

In the Haitian peasant economy a woman held three jobs at once. She bore and raised children, worked a rural plot, and carried its produce to town markets to sell. The third job made her mobile by necessity, and mobility was the thing the state found hardest to manage. In the mid 1940s, with the economy uncertain and the rubber venture in ruins, officials wanted the rural population fixed in place socially, physically and sexually. Childbearing posed no administrative problem in itself. Movement between country and town did, together with the freedom to choose partners, because the combination generated outcomes beyond the reach of the government: unrecognised children, migration into the capital, and money earned by women and held by them. The feminist scholar M. Jacqui Alexander has shown that in Caribbean markets tied to foreign trade, morality is usually spoken in the vocabulary of the monogamous married family. A woman walking to market with her own takings falls outside every clause of it.

Fighting on African soil was confined to a narrow strip of Mediterranean coast. Italian forces crossed from Libya into Egypt in the late summer of 1940 and were driven back into Libya by a small British force. The arrival of the German Afrika Korps changed the position completely, and for a time the drive toward the Suez Canal looked impossible to stop. Egyptian nationalists grew restless and feeling against the British hardened. Then the British held the Germans at El Alamein in October 1942, and the canal was safe for the empire for the time being. The threat that lasted was the Egyptian one, which outlived Rommel by more than a decade. British and Australian troops pushed the Germans west toward Tunisia. At the far end of the Mediterranean an American army came ashore in Morocco and Algeria, which put an end to the ambiguous standing of the Vichy administration there. The two forces closed on Tunisia from both sides and put the last Axis soldiers off the continent in May 1943.

In February 1944 Francois Duvalier published an article on the stadial evolution of Vodou in the bulletin of Haiti's Bureau of Ethnology. In it he credited Jean Price Mars with proclaiming to the Society of History and Geography what he called an essential truth: that 1804 issued from Vodou. His own reasoning, he added, had been bound to arrive at the same conclusion. Duvalier was then a doctor and an ethnologist, thirteen years away from the presidency. The formula compressed the whole indigenist reading of Haitian independence into a slogan, and it gave the future dictatorship a claim on the religion of the majority and on the founding event of the country in one move. Once in power he presented himself as a spiritual father and encouraged the identification. The intellectual equipment was assembled well before there was a regime to use it.

Alice Garoute, Madeleine Sylvain, Jeanne Perez and Cleante Desgraves Valcin edited La Voix des Femmes and described it as a microphone for the oppressed. It would name injustice and abuse, they wrote, and bring Haitians together in a shared love of the country. Sylvain put the second aim plainly. The paper would link Haitians who knew too little about their own women, and would reach women anywhere in the world, free or not, on behalf of women's emancipation. It circulated in the main city of every region and in every town with a league chapter, among them Les Cayes, Cap-Haitien, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix and Jacmel. It went to North America by subscription, and Bryn Mawr College was taking it before Sylvain ever enrolled there. At the Paris Exposition of 1937 the writers won a prize for their reporting. Every number set aside a column in which invited respondents answered one question, for or against feminism, and reprinted essays and speeches by thinkers from Colombia, Cuba and Peru.