1935–1960s: (The Feminine as a Laboring Class — LFAS Leaders Articulating the Feminine as a Specific Laboring Class in Which Women Shared Both the Work of Ph…

1935–1960s: (The Feminine as a Laboring Class — LFAS Leaders Articulating the Feminine as a Specific Laboring Class in Which Women Shared Both the Work of Physically Reproducing Laborers and Citizens and the Devaluation of Their Labor as Mothers Agricultural and Domestic Workers Intellectuals and Urban Professionals, La Voix des Femmes Editor Jeanne Perez Declaring We No Longer Want to Resign Ourselves to Being Nothing but Reproduction Machines and Servants of the Lord and Master, Haitian Women Having an Equal If Not Greater Share Than Men in the Production of Agricultural Wealth — a Reference to Women Peasants Market Women and Madan Sara — and the Outstanding Colonial-Era Napoleonic Code That Deemed Women Minors and Thus Not Legally Able to Hold Their Own Wages): LFAS leaders articulated the feminine as a specific class — a laboring class. Women shared both the work of physically reproducing laborers and citizens and the devaluation of their labor as mothers, agricultural and domestic workers, intellectuals, and urban professionals. La Voix des Femmes editor-in-chief Jeanne Perez declared: “We no longer want to resign ourselves to being nothing but reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master.” The organizers wanted women’s material contributions recognized: Haitian women had an equal, if not greater, share than men in the production of agricultural wealth — a reference to the women peasants, market women, and madan sara (women commerce specialists) who cultivated, transported, and marketed the nation’s food. Women’s contribution to education included the informal and formal education women offered young people. The outstanding colonial-era Napoleonic Code deemed women minors and thus not legally able to hold their own wages — a social-material reality amplified by the 1940s urban Marxist and labor movements. For LFAS members, their rhetoric regarding alienated labor was fortified by their decade of activism through night schools for women and education-housing facilities for working-class girls, both lasting into the 1960s, designed to educate the non-landowning rural peasant and urban working classes and expand the urban middle classes in an effort to build sustainable social change for women.