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.

Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, the same month the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale published the first number of its newspaper. The second number, in November, set Haitian women beside Ethiopian ones. Reports had reached Port-au-Prince that Ethiopian women were fighting, and La Voix des Femmes printed them and read that war as a campaign for sovereignty running parallel to its own. The league had already made a habit of naming the Haitian women of the revolution at the top of its pages, a roll call repeated like a libation poured before anything else could begin. Jeanne Perez kept the practice up so that the record stayed in the present tense and the next generation would inherit it already remembered. Perez knew nobody in the league was under fire. She invoked women who had been in order to argue that a long campaign for women's rights was a campaign nonetheless, and that the time, money and energy it swallowed were worth spending.