A catechism teaches children that the priest is Satan's slave

A Haitian catechism used during the antisuperstition campaigns of the 1940s taught by question and answer. Who is the principal slave of Satan? The oungan, the Vodou priest. What names does he give to Satan? The lwa, the angels, the saints, the dead, the twins. Why those names? To deceive us more easily. Have we any right to mix with Satan's slaves? None at all, since they lie and do evil as he does. The choice of the word slave was deliberate in a country founded by people who had been enslaved and who were still negotiating their sovereignty with foreign powers. Through cycles of repression practitioners were jailed, tortured and killed and their sacred objects burned. The Catholic clergy and the enfranchised classes had presented Vodou as a cult of Satan since long before, and the campaign of the 1940s put that teaching into the mouths of children.

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.

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.

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.