Istwa Nou

The marines did not leave when the American investigators asked them to, and the refusal produced a wave of organising rather than a collapse of it. The Joseph School, run across national lines, took as its subject the schooling of small children living under military rule. Madame Charles Dube of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the business teacher Rosina Jean-Joseph and Madame Dantes Bellegarde led that effort, and out of it came a new body, L'Oeuvre des Femmes Haitiennes pour L'Organisation du Travail. Its membership list is a map of who had been running things among Haitian women for a generation. Madame Etienne Mathon had led La Zelatrice and would go on to help found the LFAS. Madame Clement Pethel had led Femina. Madame Tancrede Auguste, a former first lady, ran La Creche. Alongside them sat school principals, a night school director for adults and two independent social workers. Every classroom these women opened was addressed to girls, in a country whose streets American personnel had made dangerous for exactly those girls.

L'Oeuvre des Femmes Haitiennes held its first meeting on 2 March 1926 and had the Jean Joseph Industrial School open before September. Money and names came from both sides of the water. The Haitian backers included Madame Dantes Bellegarde, Madame Francois Dalencour, Madame Pascal Elie and Eugenie Jean Joseph. The American backers included Mary McLeod Bethune, Eva T. Bowles and the socialist teacher Layle Lane. The stated purpose was to build up local industry and give ordinary people a training they could use. Harriet Gibbs Marshall, an African American educator and pianist, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt to thank him for his money and to explain the arrangement of the committee: there were plenty of male members, and the officers were women, because somebody had to rouse the men to their civic duties. The economic argument was that a country importing everything should make and sell things of its own. The social argument was narrower. The school set out to turn girls into good wives and housekeepers, and it left the question of what women were for exactly where it found it.