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.

The middle of the 1940s put three things in the same room in Haiti: a world war, the collapse of women's economic position, and a national politics unstable enough to be moved. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale used the combination. It set about building a programme that more women would recognise as a description of their own lives, and that meant three practical things. A clear statement of what the organisation held, carried through into what it actually did. More institutional weight. A working core of members who would take the load. The subject that came to the front of all this was work. Women's paid labour, women's underpaid labour, and the labour nobody paid for at all became both the league's political focus and the language it argued in. The feminism of the first decade had been built on rights and principles. The feminism of the second was built on what women did with their hands and their hours, and on what they were handed for it.

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau had declared that Haitian women were slaves. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale carried the phrase into the 1940s and used it to name three things at once: where a woman stood in Haitian society, what she was held to belong to, and what she was reckoned to be worth. In a country founded by people who had ended their own enslavement with weapons, that was the heaviest word available, and applying it to the position of women was a deliberate act. What the league did next matters more than the phrase. Across the decade its members researched and wrote, assembling evidence for the claim: what women were paid, what they were not paid, whose household they were counted inside, which of their children the registers declined to record. The language of enslavement worked as a method of measurement. It set the founding promise of the country against the daily terms of women's lives and asked how far apart the two had drifted.

Through the 1940s, with a world war running, the killing of Haitians on the Dominican border still fresh, and new international bodies such as the United Nations being assembled, the women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale kept coming back to enslavement as their term of analysis. They used it for three specific exposures: the vulnerability of Black women to sexual violence, in the past and in the present; unions in which the woman held no equal standing; and work that was underpaid or not paid at all. Marxist writers of the same years were drawing a similar line from unpaid labour to enslavement on a world scale, and the Haitian women drew it too. They were also, at the same time, thoroughly committed to taking part in capitalism, to earning, holding property and building institutions. The combination reads as contradiction only from outside. They were describing a position no existing theory had been built for, and they declined to trim the account to fit either one.

The war put every global financial system under strain, and Haiti, which sold commodities into those systems and bought manufactured goods back from them, felt the strain as a depression. The pressure did not fall evenly. Women's wages in Haiti were low before 1941, and through the war years they were pushed lower, while the price of what a household had to buy went up. Both movements struck the same people, because women held the jobs at the bottom of the wage scale and did most of the buying for their households as well. A market woman who lost part of her margin and paid more for goods was not living through a downturn in the abstract. She was working the same hours for less food. This is the material ground underneath the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale's turn toward labour politics in the middle of the decade, and the reason wages became the subject the organisation argued about.