Istwa Nou

The constitutional assembly of 1946 was the third Haitian assembly to sit free of foreign intervention since the American occupation ended. Between 1915 and 1934 the United States had dissolved the national assembly, taken over the banking system, and rewritten the constitution of 1805, the revolutionary text that abolished slavery and declared Haitians Black and independent of France. When the Marines left, new political parties appeared, along with new organisations, new cultural and intellectual institutions, and a boom in literature and journalism. The historian Matthew Smith calls the twenty years after the occupation the moment of greatest political promise in Haitian history. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale grew out of that opening. Trained teachers and women of means came together in 1935 to build a movement for social improvement and to speak for Haitian women of every class. They spent a decade petitioning the government for the right to buy property, keep their own professional wages and vote in local and national elections, and they expected the energy of the 1946 revolution to reach them as well.

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.

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.