1935 to 1957 · Haitianspan
Two decades of petitions produce Article 8 and a vote in 1957
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In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau formed the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale with nine other women: Georgette Justin, Maud Turian, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Marie Corvington, Olga Gordon, Fernande Bellegarde, Thérèse Hudicourt and Alice Garoute. They attacked gender inequality in Haitian politics directly and made suffrage the test of whether the country meant its own founding claims. Two decades of petitions, marches, essays and letters to legislators followed. In 1950 the Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 and granted women of twenty-one and over the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women cast ballots in a national election for the first time in 1957. The achievement belonged to a small professional class of women who kept insisting that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the hemisphere was still outstanding. Their charge against the founders was specific. The men who won independence at the end of the eighteenth century wrote women out of full citizenship, and nobody corrected it for a hundred and forty-six years.
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