Istwa Nou

Jeanne Sylvain wrote home. Her letters through the 1940s report the epidemics moving through the city, the legislation that touched women, and what the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was doing from week to week. She was writing to people she loved. What she produced is a running account of a decade in which local grievances, national politics and shifting international alliances collided at speed and ended, at the close of it, in a revolution. Grace Sanders Johnson sets the correspondence against the formal archive of the period and finds the same tangle in both. This is how a great deal of women's political history survives at all. Minutes were lost or never taken. Newspapers covered the assembly and skipped the meeting. What is left is a woman telling her family what happened because she could not stop noticing. The letters are family correspondence, political intelligence, and history written by someone who was not trying to write it.

The legislative record of the 1940s in Haiti shows women's rights argued over in the assembly, with grandstanding on every side of the question. The women who kept their own records were tracking something else across the same years. Misogynist speech did not thin out over the decade. It grew. Women's lives were handled as expendable. Care for women, in law, in medicine and in the ordinary running of a household, was largely absent, and it was women who documented all of this, about women, in letters and studies and the pages of their own paper. That documentation changes how the assembly attacks of 1946 read. Taken alone, the insults thrown at women in that chamber look like one bad session. Set against ten years of accumulated evidence, they are the loudest point in a campaign of attrition that had been running the whole time. The chamber only made the contempt audible.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, founded in 1934, drafted, backed and carried three pieces of Haitian legislation in the 1940s. The wage law of January 1944 gave a woman the right to hold her own earnings, which the civil code had previously delivered to her husband to administer. The repeal of the child illegitimacy law in December 1944 gave children born outside legal marriage the same rights as children born inside it. The repeal of the marriage tax in January 1945 removed the fee that had put a civil wedding beyond the reach of poor couples. Three statutes in thirteen months moved three things: what a woman earned, what her children could claim, and what it cost to marry at all. The League had spent a decade arguing that Haitian women's difficulties were legal in structure before they were moral in character. In those thirteen months the statute book conceded the point, one clause at a time.