1935–1957: (The LFAS Founding and the Suffrage Victory — In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau Along with Alice Garoute Thérèse Hudicourt Fernande Bellegarde …

1935–1957: (The LFAS Founding and the Suffrage Victory — In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau Along with Alice Garoute Thérèse Hudicourt Fernande Bellegarde Olga Gordon Marie Corvington Alice Téligny Mathon Esther Dartigue Maud Turian and Georgette Justin Forming the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, the Women Openly Challenging Gender Inequality and Using Suffrage as a Primary Target for the Nation to Achieve Its Revolutionary Promise, After Two Decades of Petitioning Marching and Writing the 1950 Constitutional Congress Amending Article 8 Granting Women Twenty-One and Older the Right to Vote, Haitian Women First Voting in a National Election in 1957): In 1935, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau along with Alice Garoute, Thérèse Hudicourt, Fernande Bellegarde, Olga Gordon, Marie Corvington, Alice Téligny Mathon, Esther Dartigue, Maud Turian, and Georgette Justin formed the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale. The women openly challenged and questioned gender inequality in politics and used suffrage as a primary target for the nation to achieve its revolutionary promise. After two decades of petitioning, marching, and writing about and to members of the national government, the 1950 Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 of Haiti’s constitution, granting women age twenty-one and older the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women first voted in a national election in 1957. The LFAS’s legislative achievement was the product of political organizing by a burgeoning class of professionalized women who maintained that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere was unfulfilled. For these women, the Black Jacobins who avenged a new world of independence and freedom at the end of the eighteenth century had ignited the slow burn of an Atlantic slave system but were negligent in their exclusion of women from full citizenship rights.