Istwa Nou

The League's crowded first years had one object, which was schooling. Sylvain put the demand plainly: Haitian feminists wanted above all the means to educate themselves, through high schools for girls, more primary schools, and a revision of what girls were taught. The leaders modelled the argument with their own records, and the organisation applauded academic achievement as a matter of routine. Madeleine Sylvain started at twenty-two by founding Pupilles des Saint-Antoine, an agency supplying basic needs to women and their children. She entered law school in 1930 and qualified in 1933. Her sister Yvonne became an obstetrician and gynaecologist, the first woman admitted to and graduated from the Haitian School of Medicine, in 1940; she specialised in venereal disease, worked through the yaws epidemic of the 1920s and 1930s, and came to treat women's living conditions as a public health emergency. Jeanne worked as a social worker and wrote to her sisters about exhaustion and impossible caseloads. Suzanne studied at the Sorbonne and researched at London University, comparing West African coastal languages with Haitian Kreyòl.

Madeleine Sylvain's father had campaigned for Haitian sovereignty and the country had followed him. Her own campaign for women's rights drew almost no attention, and where it was noticed people treated feminism as something shipped in from Europe or North America. One critic wrote that equality between the sexes was a chimera and would never become real. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale answered in print. In October 1935 it issued the first number of La Voix des Femmes, the first newspaper in Haiti run by women with a declared purpose of covering women's political and intellectual lives. By February 1936 the editors had found their footing. The paper carried political editorials, foreign affairs, and above all historical and sociological essays about women. Its ethnographic reporting was the unusual part. Roumain and Price-Mars had written about peasant life, but nobody had yet put the daily existence of peasant women in front of a national readership. Printing those lives beside the lives of city women made the shared parts visible.