15 September 1935 · Haitian
The league takes the occupation's roads out to the provinces
›Read the full entryClose
Most political movements in Haiti after the American occupation spoke nationally from Port-au-Prince and organised nowhere else. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale built chapters. Within months of its founding it had branches at Port-de-Paix and Saint-Marc. The executive secretary, Fernande Bellegarde, wrote that 15 September 1935 was a date the organisation would have to mark, because on that morning a group of its leaders got up before dawn and drove two cars north to meet the new members at Saint-Marc. The novelist Cleante Desgraves Valcin went along and reported the trip in La Voix des Femmes. Those roads had been laid by the occupation to move marines and keep watch on the country. They now carried women going out to build something the marines had never planned for. In the same period Doctor Yvonne Sylvain opened the first shelter and health centre for mothers and children, at the Centre d'Hygiene de la Saline, which turned the league's talk about care into a building with a door.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.