Istwa Nou

Marie-José N'Zengou-Tayo, a scholar of the francophone Caribbean, compared the financial competence of Haitian women across the classes and found the advantage at the bottom. Market women, farmers, day labourers and domestic workers handled money, credit and risk with more independence and more entrepreneurial skill than urban middle class women who worked for salaries. The pattern is documented in Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's account of a woman she called Adelsia, whose life shows the competence and its limit together. Adelsia's story also records that wealthier women had far more access to social mobility than any peasant or working class woman could reach. Daily practice with money did not convert into climbing. A woman could run credit, stock and pricing in her head for thirty years and finish where she started, while a woman who had never bargained for anything rose because of the family she was born into. Skill was distributed one way in Haiti and opportunity another.

A Haitian peasant wedding was a financial event as much as a celebration, and it was a point where women did the negotiating. At many plasaj weddings the groom's side presented a peye bôné, the payment of happiness, to the parents of the bride. It consisted of money, and sometimes a cow or a large quantity of food. The father received it. He handed it straight to the mother, who divided it between the new couple and herself. If the mother and the bride's godmother judged the amount too low, they were the ones who reopened the price. The ceremony gave the transaction to the men and the decisions to the women. Two women assessed what the marriage was worth, and having a second woman standing beside the mother made the assessment harder to wave away. Weddings also carried ritual and food that families saved for over months, so the money moving through the ceremony was rarely money anyone had to spare.

Plasaj is the Haitian conjugal arrangement that stands outside church and civil marriage, and it is often described as a form that left women room to move. The Haitian feminist Sabine Lamour argues for a harder reading. She traces it to the colonial period, when Africans held in captivity formed unions with no institutional standing, and she puts the weight on what the arrangement produced. Several women's labour went onto a single garden plot, and that labour is what allowed a man to hold his land against wealthy proprietors who wanted it. The habit outlived the colony by a century and a half. Plasaj normalised a work ethic in which a woman becomes valuable by sacrificing herself, and the weight of that model fell hardest and longest on Black women who were poor and working class. Lamour's reading turns the romance of the arrangement inside out. What looks like a woman's autonomous choice began as a method for turning her labour into a man's title.