Istwa Nou

Late in 1935 the League founded La Voix des Femmes, a paper appearing twice a month. It carried their research on women in Haiti, examined what women were doing politically in other countries, and printed theory and fiction about Haitian women's lives. This habit of writing themselves down ran for more than a decade before the 1946 assembly at which their politics were attacked, which is why the answers they produced then were sharp and already worked out. The paper also recorded the movement's own fault line. At one of the earliest lectures on Haitian feminism, speakers argued that elite women had to work alongside urban working women and peasants if anything was going to change. A woman in the audience wrote afterward that the proposal was incendiary and that the speaker should have kept her gloves on. The gloves were literal, the uniform of respectability among women of her class. They were also the insulation that made touching a woman of another class unthinkable to her.

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.