Istwa Nou

The league's writers made feminism familiar by routing it through the revolution of 1804, which every Haitian already accepted. In an essay asking whether one would be a feminist in Cap-Haitien, the editor Jeanne Perez used a recruiting drive to lodge the idea inside the memory of the old capital. Cap was a place of intellect, she wrote, so why would it not be feminist, and who would boast of opposing a movement whose whole demand was that women be better fed and better regarded? She closed with a cheer for the city of the great king and for feminism in the same breath, which made hostility to women's rights a form of stupidity and of disloyalty at once. A man might try to convince women they were fit only for servitude to male opinion, she added, but the qualities they were born with would wake like a giant. Perez also named the harm she was fighting. Someone wanted the memory of Sanite Belair, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere, Henriette Saint-Marc, Claire Heureuse and the women known as Madame Chevalier and Madame Pageot drowned, so that no later generation could copy them.