A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica’s market women uneconomic
A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system…
A court cancels the citizenship of a woman born in 1984
Juliana Deguis Pierre was born in the Dominican Republic in 1984. Her parents lived and worked on a sugar plantation and neither had legal residence, and under the law of…
A decree writes sexual assault into Haitian criminal law
A decree dated 6 July 2005 amended the Haitian criminal code and inserted a section headed Agressions Sexuelles. Rape and other sexual assaults, whether carried out or attempted, became punishable…
One Haitian woman in four is using something to avoid a birth
Haiti's Division of Family Hygiene was created in 1971 and started supplying contraception in 1973 through hospitals and clinics in the towns. Mobile clinics and community outreach workers were added…
The census of Kenscoff counts more wives than husbands
The 1950 census of the commune of Kenscoff recorded 1,100 married men and 1,111 married women. It counted 237 widows against 74 widowers, 76 separated women against 33 separated men,…
Five words for a Haitian union and one of them means married
Haitian censuses and surveys had counted women as married, divorced, widowed, separated or single, with placage sometimes added as a sixth box. That grid missed the commonest arrangement in the…
Three Veracruzanas come home in the captain’s cabin of a slave ship
The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly…
Rosalie Bosquet takes the highest rank in the militia
Rosalie Bosquet, known to Haitians as Madame Max Adolphe, commanded the Fort-Dimanche contingent in Port-au-Prince from 1964 to 1971. That prison was the worst in the political network of the…
A leaf seller is arrested for calling out the name of a plant
Marc Bazin was installed as de facto prime minister of Haiti on 19 June 1992, nine months after the army removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Rara bands at Leogane answered by…
Maria reports that the widow who claimed to own her is held at Petit-Goave
Isabel Pacheco, a widow of mixed African descent taken at Veracruz, was being held at Petit-Goave with her two children, aged twelve and fourteen, in November 1684. Earlier that year…