Istwa Nou

Sylvain kept the League's public posture careful. It had no plan to write laws, undermine the state or reach past what it could deliver. It wished to assist the government in social progress, loyally and without party alignment, and feminism was presented as a gesture any political group could adopt. Over the following decade that posture drew fire from several directions at once. Underneath it the work was concrete. After the summer lectures the organisation put its weight into women's education, scholastic, civic, social and sexual. In October it opened a night school for adult literacy at Saint-Antoine, continuing the school the first League had started at Saint-Anne. By November 1934 the two together counted a hundred students. Madeleine Sylvain also founded a Girl Scout troop, began running regular social surveys on women's place in Haitian society, set up a legislation committee to study what the law said about women, and organised standing visits to women in orphanages, asylums and the penitentiary. Résia Vincent, the president's sister, backed some of it, including classes for prisoners.

The month of lectures closed on 1 August 1934, the official end of the United States military occupation. Research and education were the thread running through every session. If schooling was the route to equal citizenship, the routes open to Haitian women were unequal. Price-Mars and Dartigue argued for culturally grounded education, and through the 1930s the schooling that carried prestige across all classes was European and Catholic, the kind Bellegarde defended. Industrial training could build on the labour peasant and working women already put into their land and their market trade, and it assumed a pool of applicants that contained no elite women at all. Steering women toward manual training risked hardening class lines by sorting the female workforce into trades below professions. What the series gave its audience was a way to think about crafting a politics and inserting a gendered reading into the cultural debates of the moment. Garoute and Sylvain had chosen speakers who disagreed with each other, and the League learned it could set the terms of an argument it did not own.