1935: (The Founding of La Voix des Femmes and the LFAS Intellectual Tradition — In Late 1935 the LFAS Founding the Bimonthly Newspaper La Voix des Femmes in …

1935: (The Founding of La Voix des Femmes and the LFAS Intellectual Tradition — In Late 1935 the LFAS Founding the Bimonthly Newspaper La Voix des Femmes in Which They Presented Research About Women in Haiti Interrogated Women’s Political Role Throughout the World and Theorized and Fictionalized the Experiences of Haitian Women, the Women Having Been Practicing This Textual Reflexivity for Over a Decade Before the 1946 Assembly, the “Keep Her Gloves On” Incident Revealing the Class Prejudices Within the Movement Itself — One Woman Attendee at an Early LFAS Lecture Writing That the Proposition of Cross-Class Solidarity Was Incendiary and That Even If You Talk to Your Cook Put on Your Gloves): In late 1935 the LFAS founded the bimonthly newspaper La Voix des Femmes (Women’s Voice), in which they presented their research about women in Haiti, interrogated women’s political role throughout the world, and theorized and fictionalized the experiences of Haitian women. The women had been practicing this textual reflexivity for over a decade before the 1946 assembly — the essays they would produce in response to that assembly’s attacks were theoretically sophisticated and strategically pointed. But the LFAS was not immune to the class contradictions it sought to transcend. During one of the earliest LFAS lectures on Haitian feminism, members argued that elite women needed to work with urban working and peasant women to improve women’s position in the country. In response, one woman attendee wrote that the proposition was incendiary and that the presenter should have “kept her gloves on” — implying that she was acting out of class character to suggest that elite women would share social space or touch women of another class. The admonition encapsulates the book’s title and its central tension: the white gloves that marked elite respectability were also the barrier that separated these women from the Black nation they claimed to represent. The gloves were literal — the sartorial marker of class distinction — and figurative: the insulation of privilege that made cross-class solidarity not merely difficult but, for some, unthinkable.