Istwa Nou

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau was born in Port-au-Prince on 5 July 1905 into a family already at the centre of national politics. Her parents, Eugenie and Georges Sylvain, led the Union Patriotique, the organisation that fought the American occupation. She was ten years old when the marines landed. She trained at the Bryn Mawr school of social work outside Philadelphia and became the first president of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, and in 1941, seven years after the last Americans left, she set down what the occupation had done to women. Her book Haiti et ses femmes appeared in 1951, two hundred and fifty pages running from the Ayiti of before Columbus to her own decade, built out of surveys, ethnography and the research of her colleagues, whom she cited more often than anyone else. Her claim was that Haitian women had never organised for their own rights before the invasion and that the invasion produced the movement. Maud Desvarieux of the same league recorded the other half. The occupation demoralised people, and plenty of women got no renaissance out of it.

Ghislaine Charlier was born in 1918, the year the Wilson administration dissolved the Haitian national assembly and rewrote the constitution, which put her among the occupation generation who knew no other Haiti. Her mother's parents took the invasion hard. Her grandmother Alice Garoute told and retold the story of her own influence: some months before the landings she wrote to Louis Borno, a friend from childhood then serving as minister of foreign affairs and justice and later president, pressing him to nominate her husband Auguste Garoute to the Tribunal de Cassation. Auguste was appointed, and within months was asked to sign the Haitian American treaty of 16 September 1915. He and a man remembered as Monsieur Cabeche were the only two who refused. Ghislaine sat nearby while her grandmother poured tea, read books, staged small plays and discussed with her friends how to get the foreigners out. Those women went on to organise antioccupation protests. In 1935 Alice Garoute and several of her guests founded the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale.