Istwa Nou

Through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the League worked at holding women of different classes together through study and through argument about material conditions. It never joined a political party, and it borrowed freely from communism, Marxism and noirisme when the language suited. Its steady occupation was recording what Haitian women's lives actually consisted of. Alice Garoute said early on that winning rights was only part of the programme, and that if their brothers never raised them to the rank of citizens the work of solidarity with peasant and working women would continue anyway. The League placed the division between state and nation along a line of gender, putting itself outside the state and inside the nation with the majority of women. Sylvain-Bouchereau set the priority plainly. A female elite able to compete with the male elite was a small thing on its own; reform would hold only if the intellectual level of ordinary women rose with it. Marie-Louise Barou called urban domestics the least privileged part of the female working class.

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.