Istwa Nou

Alice Thézan was born in Cap-Haïtien in 1874 into a milat petite bourgeoise family. Her mother was rumored to keep a revolver in her corsage, having taken part in the Boyer-Bazelais operations against the Salomon government, and the family spent years exiled in Jamaica for it. Garoute grew up to be older than most of the women she later recruited into the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, sharp tongued, and by every account extremely persuasive. What I want on the record is the inheritance. Haitian feminism in the 1930s did not arrive from Paris or from American suffragists. It came down through households where the women had already been in political conflict with the state for two generations, and where exile was a family experience rather than a headline. Movements have genealogies, and this one runs through a corsage.

Through the two decades of the occupation Alice Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt built intellectual circles out of fundraising and reading groups, and used them to study how Haitians had organised politically in the past. They worked through popular history and storytelling, discussing Catherine Flon, Défilée, and the women of a revolution that introduced the modern world to Black freedom. The pattern they found was repeating in their own lifetime. Women of the colonial and revolutionary periods had become symbols of liberation and remained symbols, holding no rights in the independent country. After the demonstrations of the 1930s the same thing was happening to the women who had taken part in them. Garoute and Hudicourt drew two conclusions from the national record. Equality would come to Haitian women only if a united front put specific demands to the government then taking over from the Americans, and a front of that kind would need leadership that could be named.

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.