1930s-1940s: (Legal Marriage as Jeopardy and Enhancement — Legal Marriage Meaning That Women Were Subject to the Economic Will of Their Husbands but Common-L…

1930s-1940s: (Legal Marriage as Jeopardy and Enhancement — Legal Marriage Meaning That Women Were Subject to the Economic Will of Their Husbands but Common-Law Marriages or Maintaining Long-Term Plasaj Contracts Meaning That Women Could Extend Their Access to Land Without Compromising Their Financial Independence — Each Form of Union Even the Less Litigated Relationships Involving Compromise, Haitian Economist Mireille Neptune-Anglade Identifying Multipartnered Rural Common-Law Unions as Social Contracts That Often Limited Class Mobility and Haitian Feminist Myriam Merlet Cautioning Against the Romanticizing of Peasant Women’s Economic Freedom): Marriage could jeopardize or enhance women’s financial and spatial freedoms. Legal marriage meant that women were subject to the economic will of their husbands, but common-law marriages or maintaining long-term plasaj contracts meant that women could extend their access to land without compromising their financial independence. At the same time, each form of union, even the less litigated relationships, involved compromise. Haitian economist Mireille Neptune-Anglade identified multipartnered, rural common-law unions as social contracts that often limited class mobility, and Haitian feminist Myriam Merlet cautioned against the romanticizing of peasant women’s economic freedom given the high expectations of women’s labor — the critique was aimed at outsiders who saw liberation where women saw exhaustion, the freedom to farm dawn to dusk not being the same as freedom.