1935 to the 1960s · Haitianspan
The League calls women a labouring class and the code calls them minors
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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.
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