Istwa Nou

The leadership of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale included the first Haitian woman to qualify as a lettered attorney, the first woman anthropologist, the first woman gynecologist and the first woman social worker. They carried the methods of those disciplines into their politics. In the 1930s and 1940s their work took its direction from indigénisme, the cultural nationalism Jean Price-Mars built around the claim that Haiti should treat its African ancestry as its centre. In 1917 Price-Mars had told an audience of elite women that poor and elite women were bound together by that shared ancestry whatever else divided them, and LFAS members took the class gap between Haitian women up as their own problem. When indigénisme was professionalised through the Institut d'Ethnologie in the 1940s it shaped the research of members like Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, whose subject was consistently women and girls among the peasantry and the urban poor. The Institut, founded by Price-Mars and Jacques Roumain, supplied the contacts and the tours, often arranged by women, that let Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Lavinia Williams, Melville Herskovits and Alfred Métraux do their work.

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.