Istwa Nou

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale ran its education programme on a proposition about beauty. Knowledge and intellect, its members held, carry an aesthetic value. A woman who can tell what is beautiful can tell what is shoddy, and once she can do that she can raise the standard of the things around her, which is to say the standard of her life. On that reasoning taste was not ornament and not a badge of class. It was a faculty of judgement, and judgement was what the league was trying to build in women who had been given no reason to trust their own. The organisation celebrated schooling and celebrated the range of Haitian women at the same time, and the two were connected. A member who could weigh what she saw could weigh what she was told to be. The courses that followed were practical enough, but the argument underneath them was that a critical eye is where a changed household and a changed country begin.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale opened libraries at Port-au-Prince and Port-de-Paix and ran night courses through its chapters, including those at Miragoane and Jacmel. The subjects were history, home economics and Haitian culture, with grammar, foreign languages and writing on the list as well. Classes averaged fifty students. For an organisation founded a year after the American occupation ended, with no ministry behind it and no money from the state, four towns and a standing timetable is a serious institutional footprint. The centre of the curriculum is the part worth reading twice. Whatever else was offered, the core courses were childcare and household management. The league was teaching women to run homes better while arguing in its newspaper that women were socially enslaved. Both things were true at once, and the distance between them is the ordinary condition of a reform movement working with the students, the teachers and the expectations it can actually get.

Comhaire-Sylvain wanted the artistic energy she had found in Haitian girls brought under supervision. Her recommendation was social gatherings arranged and watched by adults, at which young people would be shown plays, art exhibitions and educational films. She then told the members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale plainly what their part in this was. The women of the nation who had been to school were to teach the class that had not, and to show them what constitutes beauty. That sentence sets the league up as a court of taste. Beauty is treated as a settled question, known to women with a French education and unknown to everyone else, and the transfer runs one way only. A year earlier the same writer had been in Kenscoff arguing that a woman who never saw a classroom held knowledge worth recording. Both arguments ran in the same newspaper.

Comhaire-Sylvain proposed that instruction in beauty begin with the body, and that girls be given leisure built around their physical health. Cleante Valcin, who co-edited La Voix des Femmes, answered with a list. Volleyball, cycling and swimming were among the sports she recommended, each chosen to make girls stronger in body and steadier in mind. Valcin did not stop at naming them. She set out how long each should be played, and she listed the physical and mental complaints that each one would cure. The list reads like a prescription pad. A sport is matched to an ailment, a duration is fixed, and the patient is a schoolgirl in Port-au-Prince. Exercise entered Haitian girlhood as medicine, with the women of the league holding the position of physician and deciding the dose.

Haitian girls should be placed in sports organisations of every kind, Comhaire-Sylvain wrote, to improve the beauty and vigour of the race. The phrase locates the campaign. A girl's body was being discussed as public property, its condition standing in for the condition of her family, her district and her country. This was 1939, and the language of racial vigour was in circulation everywhere, in the journals of the noiriste writers in Port-au-Prince and in the state programmes of Europe. Haitian intellectuals had their own reasons for reaching for it. A century of foreign writing had described them as a degenerate people, and the marines had sailed five years earlier. Answering that charge with a fitness campaign accepted its terms. Girls were told to swim and to cycle so that the nation would present well, and their health was worth having because of what it demonstrated.

Valcin and Comhaire-Sylvain wrote at length about athletics and cared very little about sport. The purpose of the fitness campaign, as the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale understood it, was to fill the hours of young girls so that they would not spend them on sex or be drawn into selling it. The whole study of leisure time turns on this. Elite women were worried about how working class girls behaved in public, about what that conduct implied for the reputation of Haitian women generally, and about whether the girls would be reliable at work. Volleyball answered all three worries at once. The vocabulary was the vocabulary of uplift and the mechanism was surveillance. A programme presented as an investment in girls also served to keep track of them, and the girls being tracked were the ones already scrubbing floors in the houses of the women running the league.