Haiti: Speaking in the Feminine

“What prevents us from encouraging our wives to participate in these meetings,” says a pastor, “is that the leaders of the community steal our women and sleep with them.”

The women’s movement, like much political activity in Haiti, began clandestinely. Before 1986, under the Duvalier dictatorship, small groups of professional women protested against injustice and the treatment of women in Haitian society. Their protest was against a patriarchal societal structure, which forced the domination and submission of women by men. Working with women in the Haitian diaspora, as CRESFED writes in its publication Le 8 Mars et la Lutte des Femmes, they “denounced the harsh conditions in the country under the brutal dictatorship.”

With the departure of “Baby Doc” Duvalier on February 7th, 1986, women’s organizations formed and expanded, along side the boom in the social and economic activity in civil society. Haitian women began to assert their position as pillars of strength in the Haitian economy. “In particular,” CRESFED writes, “it is necessary to note the protests of the 3rd of April in Port-au-Prince… [the protests] brought together more than 30 thousand women of all ages, ideologies and levels of society, with the aim of vindicating their right to participate in the affairs of the country.” For women, declared the journal Ayiti Fanm, this became an historic day in the lives of Haitian women. By mid-1987, the movement had reorganized itself, mobilizing on issues such as education for women and women’s position in society.

“Women are all working,” a woman explains to me, “they have to work.” She continues, “education is the difficulty – women need a chance to get together and discuss.”

In 1987, amid the violence political turmoil and widely anticipated elections on November 29, the women’s movement began to denounce violence against women. This denunciation took on a particularly poignant turn as violence before and after the election escalated, and the government dubbed by journalists as “Duvalierism without Duvalier” returned to government. This government, according to CRESFED, was determined to “castrate the young democracy that had been installed in the country.” As life for all Haitians became even harder, CRESFED notes a new faze in the oppression of women: because of it’s force, “violence exercised in a systematic fashion against women. Violence was transformed into an instrument of repression and military power.” The international embargo, aimed at breaking the regime, essentially fell, onto the shoulders of women.

The celebration of the International Day of the Woman in 1991, after the coup d’etat in 1991, resonated with the poignancy of its theme: 500 years of resistance and domination. Commemorations thereafter allowed, as CRESFED writes, “clear and neat demonstration against the return of the repressive system, to denounce acts of violence and the activities of ‘zenglodos’ (bandits).”

When the military regime was dismantled in 1994, and constitutional order was (theoretically) restored to Haiti, the Haitian government created the cabinet position of Minister of the Condition and the Rights of Women. Increasingly, the issue of violence against women began to take an increasing dominance in the fight for women’s rights in Haiti.

With the gains made in the women’s movement reported by CRESFED, women’s position in Haiti appears to be much the same. The General Hospital, according to one resident, receives numerous cases where women have been severely beaten by their husbands. A woman who does gender training tells me, "at the end of our gender training sessions, we ask participants to make one resolution concerning the treatment of women. In some cases, it’s that they resolve to stop beating their wives.”

Indeed, CRESFED writes, “in reality, the participation of women in the political life of Haiti is still very weak…. The role of women in political and economic decisions is remains marginal. For this participation to effectively exist, the organizations must have access to all areas of decision making until women take their place in all domains.”

“My presence here [at this meeting] isn’t because I was personally invited [as some of the men claim],” another woman emphasizes, ‘“I wasn’t.”

So what has changed in Haiti? As a foreigner, I can be frustrated by the sight of men sitting in groups, talking politics, and playing dominoes while their wives are cooking, washing and caring for their children. In terms of development theory, it is commonly thought that the means to empower a family is through the women in the household. And yet it is women who have the least in terms of political and social empowerment. The discrepancy between the effective role women can play in development and the reality in a developing country like Haiti seems determined to remain one of the unfortunate ironies of development.