1905 to 1941 · Haitianspan
Sylvain-Bouchereau says the occupation made Haitian feminism
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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.
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