Istwa Nou

Jeanne Perez went on publishing La Voix des Femmes, and the paper stayed a place where women with different politics could set out what they thought and read what the others thought. The members were clear about the size of what they were up against. The arrangements that kept Haitian women without property, without the vote and without much protection were old, and were held in place by more than opinion, and the league accepted that none of it would be settled in their lifetimes. They worked on the terms that follow from that admission. The point was to set the scene for the girls coming after them, to give them room to run, or to move toward the light the way a brown and black butterfly does. In Haitian houses a mother telling stories at night asks a daughter: Ou libere? Are you free? The league was working so that a girl asked that question would be able to answer yes, mother, I am free.

The September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes was volume one, number twelve, and it sold for one gourde. The cover carried the Citadelle, Christophe's fortress in the north, beneath a masthead reading Plus de Lumiere. More light. The image did two jobs at once. It claimed the revolutionary legacy for the women publishing the paper, and it turned the claim forward, since a demand for light is a demand about what has yet to be seen. Inside, the contributors were Haitian and foreign. Their essays put the Haitian women's movement in the same room as the women's movement in the United States, the women's movements of Latin America, and the political organising of African American women. A monthly twelve issues old, run out of Port-au-Prince, was assembling an international constituency for a national argument, and it did the assembling on one sheet of cover stock.