Istwa Nou

Count them. The 1805 constitution addresses or implies women in three places. Article 10 says fathers and mothers may not disinherit their children. Article 13 exempts white women naturalized as Haytians from the ban on white property ownership. Article 22 grants an allowance to the Empress Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité. That is the entire footprint of half the population in the founding document of a country whose war they had fought. Grace Sanders Johnson's phrase for it is that women were tucked into citizenship, present by implication and absent by right. And look at the one place where a woman's status is made explicit and protective: it is the article about white women, and it exists because the constitution needed an exception to its own race clause. This is what I mean by reading a document for what it does not say. The silence is structured, and the structure is the evidence.