1937 · Haitianyear only
Haitian women have no rights, the editor tells a Montreal paper
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Madeleine Sylvain was studying social work at Bryn Mawr and spent her 1937 semester vacation in Montreal, where she met Philippe Cantave, Haiti's ambassador to Canada. La Presse followed her for the week. Asked, as editor of La Voix des Femmes, what condition Haitian women were in, she gave an answer that reads as rhetoric and works as a summary of the statute book. Haitian women have no rights. The law treats us as if we are children, criminals or insane. Haitian civil law came out of the French Napoleonic Code, and under it a woman in the twentieth century was a minor. A married woman could not keep her wages, buy property, or travel inside or outside the country without her husband's permission. Her choices in family life were read as symptoms of national weakness: separation, divorce, and above all plasaj, the common-law union most Haitians actually lived in. The republic that declared every citizen free in 1804 was running Bonaparte's law on half its population.
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