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.

The wage bill was the first thing the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale organised around, and the organisation took its shape from the campaign. Members called the bill the St. Aude Project, after the senator who sponsored the 1936 petition. It would let a married woman keep what she earned rather than hand it to the husband who held her in law as a minor. The League set up a Justice Committee whose assignment was that one piece of legislation. This tells you how the founders understood their own movement in its first years. They had a long list of grievances, from the vote to schooling to the criminalising of plasaj, and they built a standing body for one item on it. Money a woman could keep was the hinge. The structure of the organisation followed the campaign, and the committee outlasted the bill it had been created to pass.

The League argued the married women's wage law as labour legislation. The war and the political instability of the mid 1940s had opened room to press the Haitian senate on questions it would otherwise have shelved, and the League used it. Its members belonged to a wider set of Black women organising around wages across the Americas in these years. A year before the League put its wage bill before the senate in Port-au-Prince, Sadie T. M. Alexander, a lawyer, a member of the National Association of Colored Women and a friend of Yvonne Sylvain, brought forward a bill in Pennsylvania to guarantee that domestic working women were paid their wages fairly. Most of those workers were Black. Two bills, drafted a thousand miles apart, addressed one condition: labour performed by Black women that was counted as duty and paid as a favour when it was paid at all. The letters passing between the Sylvains and American clubwomen carried working methods across the water.

The law of January 1944 gave a married woman the right to hold and dispose of her own earnings. Under the civil code that money had gone to her husband to administer along with everything else the household owned. The statute was written for women married under that code. In Haiti in the 1940s only a minority of adult women were married that way. The usual arrangement was plasaj, a durable and socially recognised partnership formed without a civil or religious ceremony, and a woman in plasaj gained nothing whatever from the new law. So the immediate reach of the victory was small, and the League knew it. What the law established was a principle written into Haitian statute for the first time: earnings belong to the person who earns them, and a husband's claim on his wife's pay is not automatic. Once that sentence exists on the books for one class of women it becomes harder to argue against for the rest.

Haiti spent nine months of 1946 without a settled government, between the fall of Lescot in January and the working through of the new constitution. Yvonne Sylvain, a Haitian doctor, had several hundred dollars of savings held for her in the United States bank account of Sadie Alexander, the American lawyer who was her friend. That arrangement was the whole of her protection through the crisis, and it held. Almost no Haitian woman had a friend abroad who could do such a thing. Trade unions had no legal standing in Haiti until after 1946, so women with no foreign connection and no union had one route left, which was to ask a sympathetic legislator to act for them, as members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale did with St. Aude. The class question the assembly argued about all summer appears here as a number. A few hundred dollars in a Philadelphia account was the difference between waiting out a political collapse and being ruined by it.