Istwa Nou

The essayists of La Voix des Femmes reached constantly for the revolution. Names, dates and the language of 1804 gave a Haitian readership immediate common ground, since any woman who could read the paper had been taught that history as the founding fact of the country. The device worked. It also exposed something the writers had not set out to display. The women producing the essays were lawyers, teachers, doctors and journalists in Port-au-Prince. The women they wrote about were market traders, cultivators and domestic workers who in most cases could not read the sentences describing them. When an educated writer claimed descent from the revolutionary generation on behalf of all Haitian women, the claim reached across a gap she had just made visible. Rhetoric meant to close a distance kept measuring it instead. The tension ran through the paper from its first years, and the League never resolved it in print.

Earlier in 1935 two American suffragists, Helena Wood and Mary Winsor, came to Haiti and met the women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. Both were known at home for protests that had put them in jail. They were sent by Boris Stevens, who headed the Inter-American Commission of Women, and their errand was Haitian ratification of the treaty on the nationality of women that Haitian ambassadors had signed at the Montevideo conference of 1933. The question the treaty settled was whether a woman lost her citizenship by marrying a foreigner. The visit shows the league sitting inside a regional network rather than working alone in a small country. Haitian delegates had been at Montevideo, a commission in Washington was watching what Port-au-Prince did next, and two women who had been in American cells were in Haiti to press the case face to face. Their names turned up a few months later on a banquet menu in Saint-Marc, beside the wife of Dessalines.

At the Saint-Marc reception the members of the league called themselves liberators of women and set that claim beside the warrior Marie-Jeanne, beside Claire Heureuse, empress and wife of Dessalines, and beside Adelina, empress consort of Faustin the First. The comparison was not modest and was not meant to be. Haiti's founding story belonged to men in every schoolbook, and the women of the league were arguing that it had always had women in it and that they were the next of them. The evening closed with everyone in the room singing La Dessalinienne. Nobody had scheduled it. A national anthem coming up unprompted at a provincial gathering of a hundred people was the clearest evidence the organisers could have asked for that the day had done its work, and that the line of descent set out in the speeches and printed on the dinner menu had been accepted by the people who ate from it.

Alice Garoute published an essay in 1937 while the Senate was weighing a constitutional amendment to let married women keep their wages. Her argument was that the moral misery of Haitian women hurt as much as the worst material suffering, and that women turned their eyes toward the one who could raise them, by a gesture or a word, to the rank of free citizens of their own country. The audience was male senators and the sentence is built for them. It concedes that the power to confer citizenship sits with men and asks them to use it well. It also does something the League did often. It lets one condition stand for all Haitian women, so that a lawyer's wife who cannot sign a contract and a market woman with no wages at all appear inside the same phrase. Garoute was writing a petition. Petitions ask upward, and the direction of the ask tells you where the power was sitting.

The material dispossession of most Haitian women in 1937 was worse than any moral misery, and the women running the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had to work at seeing it. They were educated and propertied by the standards of the country, and they were describing the oppression of women from inside class advantage. The gap shows up in their language. Patriotic rhetoric served them as unifying propaganda, since 1804 and Dessalines and Marie-Jeanne belonged to every Haitian and cost nothing to invoke. Jeanne Perez kept a check on it. Women were to look straight ahead, she wrote, and turn their thinking to the past only now and then, to take comfort from the great forefathers and mothers. The League ran its paper as a compass pointed forward. Anyone can hold a commemoration. The women who cited the founders were assigning themselves the harder job of finishing what the founders left undone.