Istwa Nou

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.

In 1937 Valcin published an essay in La Voix des Femmes about domestic servants, two years before the League ran its 1939 study of them. She described young women leaving a plot of land where the vegetables were coming up well and walking to Port-au-Prince after a happiness she considered impossible. Once in the city, she wrote, their dreams melt and die inside a week or two, the way a bar of soap goes. The image is exact and it is doing work. Soap dissolves in the course of being used for somebody else's cleanliness. The migrant's hope is consumable, and the city consumes it. What the essay never asks is why the plot with the promising vegetables could not hold her. Valcin was writing from the receiving end of that migration, in a household that wanted the labour, and the piece records the strain of a feminist looking directly at a woman she employs.

Valcin's essay shifts into the second person. You are tired of doing all the work alone, so you hire her, and then you discover you have taken on a pupil. You find the patience to teach her. She adapts to the job, more or less. You get some satisfaction out of it. Then one morning, vlan, your pupil announces she is going home and will find you a replacement, and off she goes, usually for good, handing the job to a friend as untrained as she once was. The grammar is the argument. Everything in the passage happens to the employer. The servant's departure arrives as an event that befalls a household, and her reasons never enter a sentence. She may have been paid badly, worked without limit, or found something better. The essay records only that she left after being taught, which in this telling is the ingratitude.

Valcin proposed that the League open training schools for house servants. Women who came out of them unfit for service, whether through lack of schooling or through what she called roguery, would stay in the countryside to nurture the generous soul of the Haitian land and multiply its produce. There is a sorting mechanism inside that proposal. Working-class women divide into those useful enough to enter an elite household and those to be returned to the provinces, and the sorting is done by the women whose own comfort rests on the labour being sorted. It is worth naming what the plan assumes. The countryside can absorb whoever the city rejects. Agricultural work is available and pays. A woman who left the land in the first place made an error of judgement. Haitians were at that moment crossing into the Dominican Republic to find wages, which is the answer to what the generous soul of the land was providing.

Valcin's essay holds an uncomfortable fact about organised women in Haiti in 1937. Activists were not always willing or able to see other women. Inside a few paragraphs the piece swings from patronising description of a servant to patriotic conclusions about the nation, and the swing is the evidence. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale said it wanted a politics that took in every Haitian woman. Its members were also employers of Haitian women, and the essay lets you watch someone hold both positions without registering the strain. Grace Sanders Johnson keeps the piece in the record rather than filing it as an embarrassment, because a movement's arrival at consciousness is a process and processes have dates on them. The document carries the wish to lift other women and the refusal to give up authority over them, in one voice, in one issue of one paper.

In 1943 the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, the Haitian women's organisation founded in 1934 by educated women of the capital, opened a community centre for women and called it the Foyer Ouvrier, the workers' hearth. It taught childcare, languages and cooking. It held a library, and it made space for folkloric singing, dance and sport. The list looks modest written down. Set against what existed for working women in Port-au-Prince at the time, which was close to nothing, it was a building with a door that opened. The League had spent nine years arguing that Haitian women of different classes shared an interest, and had been answered by the fact that its own membership came from one class. The Foyer was that argument in brick: a physical place where a domestic servant and a lawyer's wife could stand in the same room on a stated afternoon, doing something specific. Arguments do not create encounters. Addresses do.

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau wrote the League's report at the end of 1943 and put a number into it. The Foyer Ouvrier was still being built up and had already been visited by more than 460 workers. She described it as a continuous creation, something that adapted to whatever was asked of it and that produced collaboration and understanding between the classes. The number is the part to hold. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale drew its members from the professional and propertied families of Port-au-Prince, and there were fewer of them than that. In a single year the Foyer had pulled in more working women than the organisation itself contained. Nine years of speeches about cross-class solidarity had not managed it. A room with sewing lessons, language classes and an open afternoon managed it in months. Sylvain-Bouchereau had trained as a social worker, and the report reads like a woman who has just discovered which of her instruments works.