Istwa Nou

Vincent's method after the massacre was to say little and settle quietly. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale kept reopening the question of their own responsibility inside a political and social order shifting under them. Valcin, Alice Garoute and Madeleine Sylvain all came to describe the labour of working-class women, and their exclusion from political power and from schooling, as a form of enslavement. That is the same charge they had aimed at the marriage law that took a wife's wages, now turned toward the servants in their own houses. It gives Valcin's earlier essay a different weight. The domestic worker who walked out one morning, and was called rogue for it, reappears a few years later in the same writers' vocabulary as someone held in bondage. The revision is on the record because they published as they went, which is what makes the run of that paper worth reading.

Explaining the retreat, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau said the leadership of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was closing ranks. For the moment the task was to unite a conscious group, clear of lukewarm and doubtful members, who by study could train cadres in the philosophies behind the questions that would decide the country's future. Nothing in Haitian public life ran that way. The state governed from the top down and so did most of the organisations that dealt with it. What Sylvain-Bouchereau set out instead resembles the kombit, the rural work party in which neighbours pool their labour to plant, rotate and share a crop so that everyone in the group eats. She was not sentimental about the comparison. She said plainly that the impact they wanted would take several seasons of hard and concentrated work. The irony is worth holding on to. Elite women who had struggled for years to see peasant women as equals reached for the peasantry's own model of collective labour when they needed a way to rebuild themselves.

In the October and November number of La Voix des Femmes in 1940, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau announced that the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale would withdraw its forces. The league had been organising for five years. In that time the Dominican army had massacred Haitians along the border, economic inequality had deepened, and women still held no vote and no standing in the government of the country. Madeleine was careful about what the announcement meant. The leaders had not been dazzled by what they had built, and they had not been dismantled by it either. The point was that the movement they actually wanted, a wide action taking in large numbers of women from every class and every trade, working through committees that ran themselves, could not be reached by the methods of the first five years. So the league stopped and reassessed. Announcing a retreat in your own newspaper takes a particular confidence, and organisations do it when they expect to still be there in ten years.