Istwa Nou

The war began in Europe in September 1939, and Elie Lescot became president of Haiti in May 1941. He took the country into the war on the Allied side and then into a set of wartime undertakings that cost more than they returned. One was a placement scheme for Jews escaping Nazi Europe. The other was a programme to plant rubber and extract latex, started because the Axis had closed Allied access to the plantations of the Philippines and the United States needed a supply nearer home. Both ran on Haitian land and Haitian labour, and the economy came out of them worse than it went in. Haitian women's organisations had to operate inside all of this. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale had spent the late 1930s assembling a case about schooling, child labour and the vote, and it now had to put that case to a government at war and to a president whose attention was fixed on Washington.

Writing for the organisation, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau set down an assessment she had already made some years before and now had to repeat word for word. The ideas the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale pronounced were still poorly understood. The league did not yet have the authority to impose those ideas on anyone, nor the capacity to sustain them if it had. Her tone carried reflection and ambition for the movement, and it carried a loss as well. These women had expected to be much further along after ten years of work. Political organisations almost never say this in public. The habit is to claim momentum and let the record be argued over afterwards. The league printed its own shortfall in its own paper, which tells you how it understood what it was doing: a long argument with a country that had not yet agreed, rather than a campaign to be won and announced. The admission is one of the more useful documents the movement left behind.

The first decade of organised feminist politics in Haiti ran out at the same time as the Second World War, and Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau wrote her closing essays of 1943 in the register of a communiqué from the front. Coming into 1944, she wrote, they gathered under one flag to fight evil, ignorance, illness, misery and injustice, and by the steady work of everyone who gave themselves to it they would set society back on better foundations. The vocabulary was chosen. Governments across the Atlantic were describing their war in exactly those terms, and she was placing the campaign for Haitian women's rights on the same footing with the same enemies renamed. Illiteracy and untreated disease were her fascism. It also did work at home, since a movement that speaks in the language a wartime government uses about itself is harder for that government to dismiss as a private complaint.

The call for a single restorative movement that would rebuild the nation, and perhaps the region and the world with it, was a hopeful reading of ten difficult years. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale had tried several directions at once since 1934, among them schooling, publishing, welfare work and the campaign for women's political rights. Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau was fighting a war of her own while writing about the other one. She could feel that her tactics and her organisation's tactics would have to be tightened and coordinated to defend the League against political lines that had hardened over the decade, drawn by colour, by class and by party. Men kept women off the electoral rolls, and that was one enemy. The other was the distance between the women who ran the League and the women it claimed to speak for, which ten years of work had measured without closing it.