Istwa Nou

About a quarter of Haitian women were in marriages recognised by the state or the church. The rest lived under other arrangements, which meant the campaign to let a married woman control her own wages addressed a minority from the start. The justice committee of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale identified who stood to gain. It was the woman who earned her own living, sometimes kept children on that income, could not afford a divorce, and could not spend her salary as she chose because her husband held legal guardianship over it. Set out that way, the law was a real instrument of freedom for the women it covered. Its reach followed the shape of the class that drafted it. Haitian women's economic and political room to move ran through their work and their family networks, and the professional and educated women of the towns were the ones asking where the money a woman earned actually went. The other three quarters were living under rules the state had never written.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent the 1930s doing fieldwork on marriage in the Haitian countryside. She found that the majority of rural unions had no standing in law. Couples lived in plasaj, a common law arrangement with rules of its own, or in open relationships carrying no formal tie at all. What decided the shape of a union was land. Access to a plot, whether through family inheritance or through a partner, let a woman raise produce and sell it, and selling produce meant income and the right to travel with it. Market prices and the chance of movement therefore ran through every question of who lived with whom and on what terms. This is the practical base under a great deal of Haitian women's independence. The state had a marriage law and the countryside had a system older and more widely used, in which a woman's standing was measured by what she could plant and carry to market rather than by a certificate held at a registry.