Istwa Nou

Every number of La Voix des Femmes opened with the same epigraph, from Kemal Ataturk: a people split into two categories, men on one side and women on the other, will always be weak. The Griots, the ethnological circle around Francois Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, admired Ataturk too. In the mid 1930s the league, the Griots and the socialists agreed on more than that. All three backed anticolonial movements abroad and all three distrusted the transitional government of Stenio Vincent. In its issue of August 1936 the newspaper praised an essay by Duvalier and Denis attacking Haitian deference to French thought, which asked why Black students should be taught Clovis and Joan of Arc when they had Louverture, Dessalines and Henry Christophe. Madeleine Sylvain had made the same argument months earlier, blaming a national sense of inferiority on the country's fixation with France and asking what people could claim a better past. By the 1940s the two readings of Ataturk had separated, the Griots folding him into noiriste politics while the league stayed clear of party alignment.

News reached Port-au-Prince that a daughter of Haile Selassie had joined other Ethiopian women nursing the wounded of the Italian war. La Voix des Femmes celebrated her and tied her service to its own campaign to expand nursing training for Haitian women. Some months later Jeanne Perez ran three pages under the title Our Nurses, arguing that any woman, whether enslaved or an artist or a worker or a queen, is pulled toward a sick person by an impulse she cannot explain, and that women are born nurses as they are born mothers. Making the work sacred also made it national service. It reopened a problem the league never solved. Its members were unsure how to praise women's care without conceding that self-sacrifice was women's nature. Darlene Clark Hine's research on Black nurses shows why the work was so easy to celebrate: it threatened no existing arrangement between men and women. League members reached for motherhood because the available language offered nothing better. Perez called the nurses battalions and their white uniforms armour.