Istwa Nou

The December 1944 amendment opened paternity research and equalised inheritance for children born outside marriage. It kept one restriction in place. A legally married Haitian man could not legally recognise a child conceived outside that marriage. An unmarried man could recognise his children socially and in law without difficulty. A married man could recognise only the children of his marriage. Children of a second or third partnership therefore had no claim on land, and children born to a woman in an arrangement with a married man were cut off economically and socially at once. The Haitian women's rights activist Suzie Boisrond sets out the result: alienation for those children and their mothers, and a legal ranking of sexual relationships, each rank carrying its own schedule of entitlements. One statute sorted Haitian children into three groups. The children who inherited. The children who stood in a legal grey zone. And the children the state declined to enter in its books at all.

The Haitian legislation of 1944 and 1945 on marriage and legitimacy rested on women's childbearing, their sexual arrangements and their work on the land. Elie Lescot expected that lifting the marriage tax and the illegitimacy bar would produce more civil weddings and more children entitled to inherit. A child with a claim on a family plot would stay in the rural districts and take the plot up when the recognised father died. That held the agricultural workforce in place at a moment when Haiti needed export crops and had just watched its largest agricultural venture collapse. Sanders Johnson reads the whole package as land policy delivered in the language of morality. The president spoke about honourable partnerships and Christian households. What the statutes regulated was where Haitians lived, whose children could hold ground, and how many workers would still be standing in the countryside when the next foreign contract arrived.

In the Haitian peasant economy a woman held three jobs at once. She bore and raised children, worked a rural plot, and carried its produce to town markets to sell. The third job made her mobile by necessity, and mobility was the thing the state found hardest to manage. In the mid 1940s, with the economy uncertain and the rubber venture in ruins, officials wanted the rural population fixed in place socially, physically and sexually. Childbearing posed no administrative problem in itself. Movement between country and town did, together with the freedom to choose partners, because the combination generated outcomes beyond the reach of the government: unrecognised children, migration into the capital, and money earned by women and held by them. The feminist scholar M. Jacqui Alexander has shown that in Caribbean markets tied to foreign trade, morality is usually spoken in the vocabulary of the monogamous married family. A woman walking to market with her own takings falls outside every clause of it.