The 1940s · Haitiandecade
Alice Garoute answers an assemblyman who called her manure
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An assemblyman said the elite women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale were full of manure. Alice Garoute replied that manure is fertiliser of the greatest order, and that mud dirties everything it touches. The exchange is a fair sample of how these women worked. Jeanne Perez wrote that a woman might turn out to have a personality other than the one she had spent her life swallowing. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a novelist of the same generation who joined no party, spent her working life on the question of what a woman's political life actually consists of, and her Claire Clamont is the fullest answer: calculating and caring, public and private, conservative and experimental, mostly inconsistent. Grace Sanders Johnson reads the league's own record in the same terms, as something voluminous, adorned and often unproductive. Carolle Charles supplies the caution. Thinking alone does not break the constraints that class and colour impose. Dressing for tea was a theory of how to be in the world. It was never a solvent.
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