Istwa Nou

The woman turned away at the door walked into a quarrel. After Lescot went into exile in January 1946, Haitian politics was crowded and impatient. Leftist organisers argued that the light skinned presidents holding office since the occupation represented neither the colour nor the class of the country's black majority. Migration from the countryside to the towns, the swings in world markets between the wars and after, and the rise of anticolonial black nationalism elsewhere all raised the temperature. The men who came to the August assembly were noiristes, communists, labour organisers and socialists, united only in wanting nothing of the old order left standing. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had support among the communists of the Parti Communiste Haitien and the socialists of the Parti Socialiste Populaire, including its president Max Hudicourt. It had none among the leading noiristes. The two currents had shared a front led by Emile Saint-Lot until June, when the communists broke with a leadership that treated colour as the fundamental division and class as secondary. The attacks that followed were personal, and at the assembly they landed on the women.

The assemblymen's contrast between women of the countryside and spoiled women of the capital described something real. Michel-Rolph Trouillot later named the division as a long war between the state and the nation. The state meant the urban, educated, mostly light skinned and propertied part of the country, whose business was governing and rights. The nation meant the black majority in the countryside and the working districts, whose business was culture and production, who farmed, who carried goods between country and town, and who descended from the people who made the revolution. The femme du peuple belonged to the nation. She probably worked most of the week in Port-au-Prince, and her social position was that of moun andeyo, people from outside. The qualifier du peuple marked her as standing for pep la, which is why the hall erupted when she was removed. The Ligue women lived in the city and sat beside the state without holding it, connected by schooling and family to men who did. Voting rights are a claim made through government, and that made them the property of women who could reach government at all.