The suffrage debate becomes a hearing on whether women can be trusted

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.

In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the right of all peoples to choose their own government and to be protected from aggression. Educated Africans read it and asked the obvious question. Churchill was obliged to reply that Britain already looked after its imperial subjects perfectly well. The reply did not hold.African newsletters multiplied through the 1940s and their contents travelled further by word of mouth than by print, and the comparison being drawn everywhere was between fascism in Europe and colonial rule in Africa. Organisers took the charter as evidence that the system was weak and the philosophy behind it bankrupt. Roosevelt, anti-imperial by instinct, pressed his ally for a postwar timetable. By the end of the war a generation of young Africans educated in Europe and the United States had gathered around pan-Africanism, and at the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945 they stopped submitting petitions. The demand was the dismantling of the colonial empires and total independence.

Jeanne Perez travelled to New York in 1947, and an account of the trip records that she formed a great liking for Harlem, a place she had heard a great deal about. Harlem in 1947 held the largest concentration of black political and artistic life in the United States, with its own newspapers, theatres, churches and organisations. Perez had spent years teaching Haitian girls, her niece among them, that their country's revolution and its monuments belonged to them, and she had written the girl a tour of the fortress Henry Christophe built in the northern mountains. The Harlem visit extended that education outward. What she wanted to leave behind was a habit of recognition, so that a Haitian girl reading about black life in another country would take it as connected to her own and not as foreign business. The geography of the lesson grew from the mountains above Cap-Haitien to the avenues north of Central Park.

Dumarsais Estime became president of Haiti in 1946 under the slogan of a black man in power. He had been a deputy under Sthenio Vincent and under Elie Lescot, he was the son of large landowners in the Artibonite, and he was married into an old mulatto family. The economy helped him. Postwar markets lifted coffee and sisal, exports doubled, tourism brought in foreign currency, and the budget rose from twelve to twenty one million dollars between 1946 and 1949. In that setting the noiriste argument appeared to be demonstrating its own usefulness. A substantial black section of the bureaucracy took shape and allied itself with the traditional fractions of the bourgeoisie of every shade, strengthening them. The black petty bourgeoisie expanded in the liberal professions, in small commerce and in the civil service. Reforms were announced for the peasantry and the working class and nothing changed for them. Repression of the unions and the left followed later.