Istwa Nou

The Nursing School of Haiti was founded in 1918 under United States military and Catholic Church supervision. Enrolment stayed low for as long as the occupation ran it, despite the public health programme that was supposed to be the occupation's showpiece. Haitians took the school over in 1930 and the numbers rose at once. By 1936 it counted 321 students, 158 graduates and 18 promotions. Most of these women came from working class and poor families. Nursing paid a salary adequate to the work and required continuing study, so it produced a professional class of women who had not been born into one. That was precisely what the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale wanted, since closing the distance in wealth and standing between Haitian women was the organisation's central aim. The women who wrote about this work placed themselves deliberately alongside African descended nurses in other countries, in a legion of women expanding through their own nations for the sake of sustained independence. The comparison was a claim about who they were.

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.