This article examines both the national context and the development of Haitian women’s organizations and struggles in the diaspora over the last forty years. It looks at their interconnectedness and their relations to structures of power at the level of the state and civil society. Three main sources of data inform the argument: secondary ethnographic and sociohistorical analyses, participant observation in Haiti and Haitian communities in North America, as well as informal group and individual interviews with Haitian women.

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.

My dissertation titled "Mambos, Priestesses, and Goddesses: Spiritual Healing Through Vodou in Black Women's Narratives of Haiti and New Orleans" reclaims the practice of Vodou as an integral African spiritual tradition through fiction by black women writers. I discuss how the examination of Vodou necessitates the revision of colonial history, serves as an impetus for reevaluating the literary representation of the black female migrant subject, and gives voice to communities silenced by systemic oppression.

In a climate of deep insecurity and escalating violence, Haitian women, the backbone of Haitian society and economy, are facing insurmountable challenges. Although Haitian women support the majority of Haiti’s economic activities and hold families together throughout the country, they have historically occupied an inferior social position.

The emergence of the women's movement in the 1960, the adoption by the United Nation of the Decade for Women (1975-85) prompted the development of research on gender issues. Action research is a methodology that puts women at the center of the analysis. This paper identifies the emergence of action research in the Caribbean. It argues that in the case of Haiti gender and feminist action research has not fully developed. In fact, gender issues is still not a field of inquiry.

The twentieth century saw a wide range of struggles for women’s empowerment and equality in Haiti. In this excerpt, Carolle Charles focuses on the politicization and the consequent victimization of Haitian women under Duvalier. Exploring the phenomena of indiscriminate violence and repression as generative of political being, Charles unpacks the means by which the Duvalierist state ironically transformed women into more politicized, albeit more vulnerable, citizens.

The focus of this study is on the experiences of Haitian women and power from 1946 to 1990 in the Haitian political sphere, where men have always been de facto holders of power. Most of the data for this research was collected during the 1993 year in Haiti and New York through questionnaires and structured interviews. The participants were ten women, of the top ranking national political figures including: one head of State, five cabinet ministers, one senator and three mayors.

Tous droits réservés. Republié avec l'autorisation du·de la détenteur·rice du droit d'auteur et de l'éditeur·rice, l'Institut Français en Haïti.

L’œuvre d’Annie Desroy, Le Joug (1934), est revisitée par l’autrice Yvette Tardieu Feldman, qui insiste sur la nécessité de prêter une attention aux écrits féminins sans discrimination. La méconnaissance de ces œuvres générée par le paternaliste, créée des défauts dans l’histoire littéraire du pays. Le Joug témoigne de l’assimilation haïtienne par les Américains pendant l’occupation de ces derniers. Elle aborde aussi les relations interraciales, les contradictions de l’aliénation et les conditions des femmes autant américaines que haïtiennes.

This chapter seeks to introduce a different kind of pedagogic volume that contextualizes Haiti outside of the stereotypes created by the West and that have beleaguered it for more than a century. The authors thus provide new ways of teaching about Haiti that portrays a more complex portrait of the country that challenges the neocolonial, imperialist, racist and simplistic discourses that are so prevalent in everyday discussions.