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 League's leaders described women as a class defined by labour. Women did the work of producing labourers and citizens with their bodies, and every other kind of work they did was discounted, whether they were mothers, cultivators, domestic servants, intellectuals or professionals. Jeanne Perez, who edited La Voix des Femmes, wrote that women would no longer accept being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. The organisers wanted the material contribution counted. Haitian women had a share in producing the country's agricultural wealth equal to men's or larger, a claim resting on the peasant cultivators, the market women and the madan sara who moved and sold the nation's food. Women also did most of the teaching, formal and informal. Against all of it stood the Napoleonic Code inherited from the colony, which classed a married woman as a minor and denied her the right to hold her own wages. The League backed the argument with night schools and housing for working-class girls, both still running in the 1960s.