Istwa Nou

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale campaigned to change what a Haitian woman could earn and own inside a legal marriage. Its own papers record members disagreeing with each other about how a wife should conduct herself and about whether divorce should be available at all. On the institution itself the organisation held a steady line. Its programmes, its publications and its classes presented legal marriage and motherhood as the marks of a respectable Haitian woman. Members were fully aware that the civil code disadvantaged wives. They maintained that marriage remained worth having, partly because the title Madan carried a standing that offset what the code removed. A woman addressed as Madan in Port-au-Prince got answers that a woman in plasaj did not. Sanders Johnson reads this as strategy. The League was working on a state that recognised one kind of household, and it used that recognition to get women heard while attacking the terms on which it was granted.

The League's regard for state sanctioned marriage was widely shared among Haitian women. Women of every class and region attached some particular value to a legal wedding, and their reasons diverged. The legislation passed between 1944 and 1945 makes the divergence visible. For a professional woman in the capital, a legal marriage meant standing and a claim on institutions that answered to standing. For a peasant woman it bore on land, on what her children could inherit and on whether a partner's family could put her off a plot after his death. For the government of Elie Lescot it was a way of fixing households in one place and settling questions of inheritance in the countryside. For the Catholic church it was a sacrament and a matter of moral order. Four parties used one word and meant four things by it, and the laws of those two years were written in the narrow band where the four meanings overlapped. For a woman with no land, no husband and no wages, the word carried nothing at all.

In 1945 President Elie Lescot announced a sharp reduction in the national marriage tax. People called it the Marriage Tax Law. Where a rural couple had faced fees of at least twenty gourdes to be married, the charge became half a gourde everywhere in the country. Lescot told the nation that the measure would strengthen marriage and would give civil status to children born in Haiti, and that peasants who could not previously afford the fee would now have the means. Most Haitian couples lived in unions the state did not record. Their children had no birth registration, no legal father and no inheritance claim a court would hear. Lowering the fee looked like relief for poor households. It was also the government reaching into arrangements that had stayed outside its files since independence, because a household that marries at the registry becomes a household the state can count, tax, conscript and govern.

Lescot explained the marriage law further by saying he had decided to fight what he called polygamy among the peasants, which he named as the source of the astonishing growth of the population. Rural Haitian households often involved a man with more than one union, and the president treated this as the engine of overcrowding in the cities. The arithmetic does not hold. Sanitation and health care in the countryside were poor enough that infant mortality among the poor cancelled most of any advantage in births, so poor families were raising roughly as many surviving children as the middle-class and elite families of the urban centres. Births outside marriage could not by themselves have filled Port-au-Prince. What Lescot had done was locate a national problem in the bodies of rural women, which cost the treasury nothing, while the conditions that actually drove people off the land went unnamed in his message to the country.