1917 to 1934 · Haitianspan
Price-Mars tells elite women that peasants hold their African past
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At the LFAS workshop of June 1934 Jean Price-Mars led the session on Haitian women in history. His argument went back to a lecture he had given in 1917 called Women of Tomorrow. He sorted Haitian women into peasant and elite and held that a shared African ancestry bound the two together. He then told the elite women in front of him that they stood further from that ancestry, and that contact with peasant women would let them recover a more authentic Haitian womanhood. Peasant women's bodies and labour, he said, remained in the primitivity of African tradition, which made them the witnesses to a pure African past. He also called Haitian women the tools of Haitian men: peasant women literal tools of field and market work, elite women ornaments for a husband's reputation. He compared the arrangement to the position of a slave. His remedy was schooling. He asked women to stop drawing on a Christian tradition that left them intellectually poor and to be impregnated in their brains with civic and cultural learning, an intellectual conception in place of an immaculate one.
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