Istwa Nou

Once the Americans left, Haitian political argument organised itself around class and colour. Leftists around Jacques Roumain held that the fundamental problem was the distribution of wealth and that politics built on colour served as a veil over it, while acknowledging that colour prejudice existed. A group of young intellectuals called the Griots, among them Louis Diaquoi, Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier, read Arthur Holly and Jean Price-Mars and reached the opposite conclusion, that colour prejudice was the central fact of Haitian life. By the 1940s they had turned indigénisme into noirisme, an antiliberal Black nationalist doctrine holding that darker skinned Haitians carried an ancestral inheritance from the founders and were therefore the authentic nation and its rightful rulers. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale spent its first year working out where it stood. Most members were Black and the membership crossed classes, while the social standing of its leaders made the organisation look milat from outside, which was enough to keep many women away. The Ligue presented itself as a research body serving the nation.

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.