La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934-1986.

Abstract

La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women’s Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montréal, 1934-1986 is a response to the haunting absence of scholarly attention to Haitian women in Caribbean and North American political history in the twentieth century. I consider the ways in which elite and middle-class Haitian women’s concepts and practices of activism and feminism both emerged from and influenced debates on race, nationalism, and international politics among black activists in Haiti and North America during the U.S. Occupation (1915- 1934) and in the half century that followed. I argue that in the post-U.S. Occupation period of renewed nostalgia for the Haitian Revolution, Haitian women challenged the premise and promise of Haitian democracy and national identity by publically articulating their experiences of violence, sexual practice, and political inequality. In voicing their experiences and documenting their perspectives on working class and poor women’s lives, elite women crafted a feminist framework for understanding modern Haitian womanhood and carved a space in the archival history of the region that calls for a recalibration of the collective memory and written record of twentieth century Haitian, Caribbean and North American transnational political and social history.

Tracing the evolution of the women’s movement through the lives of its pioneering leadership and the migration of Haitian women activists from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Montreal, Canada, in the mid-20th century, I study Haitian women’s strategic pivoting between national and international alliances to achieve their feminist goals. In my exploration of Haitian women’s collaborations with early twentieth century Pan-Africanists, African American clubwomen, Haitian left-wing politicians, and Afro-Canadian feminists, I consider the corporeal and metaphoric uses of Haitian women’s bodies to demarcate the boundaries of Haitian citizenship and authenticate post-colonial Black humanity internationally. By contextualizing the interrelated narratives of Haitian women’s transnational activism and their negotiation of issues such as foreign intervention, African descendancy, and transmigrant identities, La Voix des Femmes communicates the evolving meaning and purposes of Haitian women’s activism in national and regional color, class, and cultural politics.