Istwa Nou

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince in 1935 and was the first organised women's movement in Haiti. The legal historian Mirlande Manigat gives the standard later judgement on it. More radical women's movements came afterward, and they left the pioneer organisation somewhere between reverence and dismissal, honoured for opening the road and faulted for refusing to walk it to the end. Grace Sanders Johnson found the same doubleness in her interviews, most of them taken shortly before and shortly after the earthquake of January 2010. The earthquake ended the argument for many of the people conducting it, since leaders of the Haitian women's movement died in the collapse. Gina Athena Ulysse then called for new stories about Haiti on the ground that the old ones had stopped working, having reduced a country to resilience, poverty, pity and the supernatural. Haitian women organising in the twenty-first century face what the founders of 1935 faced: a wealth gap, a state that barely registers them, foreign intervention, predatory markets, sexual violence, and schools and clinics they cannot reach.