White Gloves, Black Nation now offers the most comprehensive study of the history of the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale (LFAS). Founded in 1934, following the departure of the American occupation force from Haiti, the LFAS marked the history of Haitian women’s struggles by constituting a pillar in the structuring of organized feminist mobilization in Haiti. Its many areas of struggle, ranging from women’s sovereignty over their bodies to the fight to de-occupy the land, embrace women’s participation in political life and reflect on social protection. They also enable us to understand the positioning and future of feminism within the Haitian social movement. As Sanders Johnson says: “Haitian women’s post occupation politics emerged and reflected a new configuration of national belonging through, around, and beyond the state.”1
This book makes a major contribution to the dynamic of writing history in the feminine in Haiti, as it breaks with the tradition of irony, disqualification, silence imposed on women, and ignorance of their struggles. Indeed, White Gloves, Black Nation is part of a vast movement to denounce the absence of women in Haitian historiography, a grievance expressed by authors such as Myriam Chancy, Evelyne Trouillot, and Yvelyne Alexis.2 It also confirms the writings of Haitian feminist activists on women’s political participation. In this book, Sanders Johnson has taken up the challenge of unveiling a tradition of Haitian feminists, both inside and outside the country. By constituting a link in feminist academic research, it contributes to the literature on Black feminism on the American continent, and discusses the place of Haitian women in the history of resistance and struggles against oppression in Haiti and around the world.
The title reveals an ambiguity insofar as the author wonders how women wearing white gloves from the upper echelons of society, adopting the Western [End Page 93] way of life, were able to engage with demands that concern all strata of the population. This passage sums up the ambiguity of Haitian political struggles in general and not just those of women. These struggles legitimize themselves through a quest for respectability that is subject to the outside world, while at the same time addressing national issues. This process places the League’s members in a position of political defector. To wage a struggle for the sovereignty of themselves and their space under attack from the outside, women are forced to appropriate the codes of external respectability by wearing white gloves, yet they are rejected from within.
White Gloves, Black Nation highlights the dilemmas and tensions running through the feminist movement at the time. How do we dialogue with the outside world with white gloves, while asserting a Black nation’s right to sovereignty? How can we achieve a respectability that is understood by the outside world, while at the same time striving for the self-determination that is denied to women in other contexts? Sanders Johnson shows that Haitian women have lived through a situated experience of oppression that traditional feminist discourse has difficulty addressing. Indeed, this feminism has failed to reveal the harmful effects that imperial dynamics exert on the lives of women living in the countries of the South(s). Yet, these oppressions are likely to provoke the emergence of an original praxis. For example, the question of women’s work and autonomy does not have the same meaning in the North as it does in the South. On the basis of this initial reading, it is possible to identify four issues and dilemmas that emerge from White Gloves, Black Nation: women’s involvement in the political life of their country; the particularity of feminist thought; the context of the events and places where feminist work is carried out; and the dilemmas involved in its contribution to national literature.
Sanders Johnson traces almost half a century of the history of the Haitian feminist movement and the political action undertaken by the LFAS. Its chronological framework stretches from the period of Haiti’s occupation by the United States (1915–1934) to François Duvalier’s accession to power in 1957. It…
