Istwa Nou

Madeleine Sylvain, Alice Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt had spent the occupation years raising money, organising and marching alongside the nationalists who wanted the Americans out. They knew Sténio Vincent personally. They had helped pay for the delegation that carried the case for Haitian sovereignty to Washington, and they had built the international standing of the men who made that case. When the occupation ended they expected the new legal order to record what women had done to earn it. It did not. The 1930s brought two constitutional conventions and a long run of chances to alter the legal position of Haitian women, and each one closed with nothing gained or with ground lost. In June 1935, a year after the last marines sailed, Vincent put a referendum to the country that extended his own term and let him succeed himself. His powers grew considerably. The constitutional standing of Haitian women stayed where the French code had left it.

Stenio Vincent had organised against the American occupation before he became president, and by 1937 he was imprisoning Haitians who criticised him in public and threatening others with exile. The headline over Madeleine Sylvain's Montreal interview said that in Haiti women have no rights. It ran while he was under attack at home and abroad for his mild response to the killing of Haitians on the Dominican border that October. Sylvain understood herself to be doing diplomatic work. She talked up the revolution and the independence of 1804, and she talked up Haitian folklore, presenting a country coming out from under twenty years of United States rule. She was also continuing her parents' work, since her mother and father had built international support during the campaign against the occupation. The League's women had pledged that the reality and the voice of Haitian women would be heard. Sylvain kept that pledge in a foreign newspaper while her president preferred quiet.