Istwa Nou

After the constitutional disappointments the women of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale kept asking for changes in the law and started looking for other ways to get them. The methods built during the occupation, public meetings, fundraising drives and the press, now went into navigating the bumpy road of the Vincent years. Madeleine Sylvain spoke to the Canadian press in 1937, when the League was two years into its programme of social service and political work, and said their progress was still hardly perceptible. She was right about the pace. Over the next two decades she and her allies worked at the problems they had named at the start: schooling for girls, the legal position of married women, wages, and the condition of women in prisons and asylums. Sylvain admitted the programme might look ambitious. The membership staked the organisation on women's intelligence, their labour and their capacity for friendship, and published its answer to the doubters: our fight is not a chimère.