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.

In June 1934 the League put itself in front of the public. Its leaders treated the hostility they met as a problem of visibility, answerable by showing up and by publishing research. From 13 June to 14 July they ran their first large event, a four week lecture series on Haitian feminism at the Union Club in Port-au-Prince. The sessions were meant to raise social and cultural awareness and to get people arguing about current affairs, and the organisers wanted the country's philosophical quarrels dragged into action. The gatherings were advertised as democratic space where anyone could set out a vision of representative government and show competence as a citizen. Admission cost 2.50 gourdes. The month covered feminism and women's education, Haitian women in history, the modern organisation of education, and feminism in France. The speakers carried it: Jean Price-Mars, who built indigénisme; Dantès Bellegarde, diplomat and minister of public instruction; and Maurice Dartigue, director of rural education. Price-Mars was known for accusing the elite of collective Bovaryism, of dreaming themselves into France.