Istwa Nou

Under Haitian law a woman married by the state became her husband's legal minor. Money she earned belonged to him. Senator Denis St. Aude put a petition before the national legislature in 1936 asking that married women control their own wages, and the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale carried the fight for the next eight years under his name. Members called it the St. Aude Project. Alice Garoute of the League described the married woman's financial position in the one vocabulary the country could not brush aside: unpaid labour, the condition of the enslaved, indentured servitude. A League committee report said the project came to liberate. The choice of verb was deliberate in a republic that had abolished slavery by war and then written a marriage law that kept its central term. The bill became law in 1944, eight years after a senator first read it out.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain attached a warning to her own numbers. Statistics, she wrote, have to be used with caution. The problem was the source. Haitian population growth was calculated from Catholic baptismal records, so a birth entered the count only when the church wrote it down. Births that happened outside a hospital were missing. Births to parents who had not married in church were missing. In a country where most women gave birth at home and most unions were never solemnised by a priest, that is a large hole rather than a rounding error. The official Haiti of the 1940s was a partial Haiti, and the part left out was the poorest and the most rural. The gap points directly at what the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale took up in 1944 and 1945. Children the parish had never recorded were the same children the law on illegitimacy penalised. The silence and the statute were describing one set of women.

The Foyer was a stop on a longer political road for Haitian women, and it carried its own contradictions. Madeleine and Jeanne, who taught there, took a serious interest in Haitian folklore and its history. They visited the Institut d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince, where Lorimer Denis, a member of the Griot circle around Haitian ethnology and black nationalism, gave them guided tours and explained the meaning of the objects with evident enthusiasm. The same organisation that ran the Foyer, the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, put Vodou performance on the stage of the Rex Theatre for a paying public. Inside the Foyer classroom the teaching leaned Catholic and socially conservative, aimed at girls' piety and at ending in a legal Christian wedding. Vodou was heritage worth exhibiting on one side of the street and something to be grown out of on the other. Sanders Johnson leaves the contradiction standing, because the League never resolved it either.

Twenty years of research let Comhaire-Sylvain watch a part of Port-au-Prince change. She wrote about Zone III, which was made up of the students and the teachers of the Foyer, and she called them the most vigorous of all the social classes in the capital, the one most likely to advance quickly in the years ahead. Their appetite for connections across class lines, she noted, made them sympathetic to the peasantry. What she had been charting for two decades is what others have since called the Black middle class. Then in 1959 she wrote down where its energy had gone: the support of this group had put Francois Duvalier in the presidency. The women the Foyer educated became the constituency that carried him there. A feminist project measured its own success and found that its graduates had helped install the government that would spend the next thirty years closing every association in the country, including theirs.