Istwa Nou

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.

The opening complaint carries more than Valcin intended. Tired of doing all the work alone. That phrase accounts for the unpaid and underpaid labour of Haitian women in every class: the cooking, the laundry, the raising of children, the running of a household, and the work outside it as well. All of it underwrote the political, economic and social standing of men, and none of it was counted. An elite woman had no way to convert her own unrecognised work into standing of her own. What she could do was buy relief, hiring another woman at wages far below the value of what that woman produced. The first abuse of women's labour generated a second. Valcin could not see her servant as an equal. In describing her own exhaustion, and her own remedy for it, she nonetheless drew the chain that runs from the unpaid wife through the underpaid domestic to the man whose position rests on both.

The arrangement Valcin described in 1937 has a name. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born Communist and Black internationalist working in the United States, set it out in the following decade as superexploitation: race, class and sex compounding in the labour of Black working women, so that what they suffer exceeds the sum of its parts. Women writing in La Voix des Femmes were tracking the same structure at the same time from Port-au-Prince. Their position differed from hers. Jones wrote as an organiser of the exploited. The League's writers were arriving at the analysis from inside the contradiction, as women who theorised the exploitation of women and hired women at wages they themselves set. What survives in the paper is the navigation itself, the visible working out of whom they meant by women and what a cross-class alliance would cost the people proposing it.

Valcin set out to complain and produced a record of refusal. The woman in her essay leaves a household where she is known, where she has been trained, and where the employer considers the relationship close. She leaves for uneven prospects somewhere else. She is choosing. That choice puts women at the crossing point of labour, capital and migration, and it says plainly that Haitian women did not share one set of concerns merely because they shared a country and a legal status. The League could organise in public and in private, draft petitions, run committees and publish a monthly. It could not set the terms on which other women engaged with any of it. The domestic worker who is gone one morning is deciding for herself what freedom is worth and where it might be found. No resolution passed in Port-au-Prince gave her that, and none could take it back.

Valcin called the woman who changed employers rogue. The word does specific work. It moves the account from what happened, a worker left a job, to what she is, a person of defective character, and it licenses whatever comes next. Once she is rogue she can be kept out of the training school, sent back to the countryside, and struck off the movement's list of Haitian women worth organising. None of this was peculiar to Haiti. Elite and middle-class Black women across the diaspora in these decades were preoccupied with the migration of Black girls into cities and with how women conducted themselves in public, and they built respectability programmes on that worry. The vocabulary travelled with the programmes. Naming autonomy as delinquency let women who described themselves as advocates take up the work of supervision, and it converted a labour decision into a moral flaw.