Istwa Nou

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.

The woman turned away at the door had not wandered in. Her intention was to join the women in their section. She may have belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, or attended its night schools, or used the Foyer Ouvrier, the community centre the Ligue ran in Port-au-Prince. Outside, Daniel Fignole had brought out the urban working class following he called the rouleau compresseur, the steamroller, to roll over any resistance to workers' rights. His Mouvement Ouvrier Paysan supported women's rights, ran a women's section in its newspaper Chantiers, and in 1948 founded a Bureau d'Action Feminine led by Carmen Jean-Francois Fignole. Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau later recalled that in 1946 there were many women's groups in Haiti, from the left to the Christian right, and that the Ligue was the only one with no party attachment and an explicit feminist programme. Most people in the hall disapproved of the woman's removal, including the same crowd that jeered the Ligue when it walked out. Almost none of them did anything afterwards to bring her back in.