Istwa Nou

On 10 May 1934 Madeleine Sylvain founded the League a second time, with Alice Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt beside her and seven more women signing: Fernande Bellegarde, Olga Gordon, Marie Corvington, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Maud Turian and Georgette Justin. Around them they gathered teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists and social workers. The name was the one the government had just refused. The platform was new, built around poverty, hygiene, the care of children, and the moral, physical and intellectual condition of women in every social class. Vincent's ministers were satisfied and the authorisation came through with little trouble. Sylvain wrote later that the founders understood feminism above all as a movement for social improvement. That framing pulled the organisation away from a narrow demand for political rights inside the state and pointed it at the social structure of the country. It was also a calculation. A public mission of charity would keep the government calm and bring in people who would never sign a suffrage petition.

Once the League had its mission the leaders set about recruiting and about placing themselves inside national political argument. The message was multiclass activism and a single Haitian womanhood. The roster complicated it. Madeleine Sylvain, the president, was an attorney. Alice Garoute, the vice president, was an intellectual married to a high court judge. Thérèse Hudicourt came from a prominent family and practised social work. The secretary general was Fernande Bellegarde, whose father Dantès Bellegarde had served as ambassador. Sylvain's sisters Yvonne, Jeanne and Suzanne were members too, and between them they were the country's first woman doctor, a certified social worker and an anthropologist. To many Haitians this looked like a club for rich women with charitable intentions and no knowledge of how the majority lived. Chantalle Verna reads the group as an ordinary professional class whose advantage lay in schooling, skills and contacts more than in accumulated wealth. The League set itself up as a research body on women's lives, seven years before the Institut d'Ethnologie was founded to study Haitian culture.